The Apex of Human Achievement
by Apex Writer
Summary: What begins in an alley in Detroit has far-reaching consequences. Only Harry Potter, the boy who lived, can bring humanity to THE APEX OF HUMAN ACHIEVEMENT. A riveting, realistic cyberpunk thriller, for the truly mature and sophisticated readers only. WalkingMassOfComplexes calls it "... /so/ cool and hip and /mature/ ... dark/gritty/violent..."
1. Chapter 1

"It's raining out." Kevin observed thoughtfully as a flame flared in the darkness of an alley. Hagrid lit his cigarette in the darkness of the flame. The light snapped out and the two faces disappeared in the darkness.

"Why do I have to do it?" Hagrid protested. He was wearing a light brown trench coat. It was wet from the rain. Kevin was wearing one, too, and it clung to his wet frame like a cellophane wrapper.

"It's not like we have a choice, you're the only one he'll listen to." Kevin said as he wandered over and sat down on the lid of an open dumpster. "Its destiny, Hagrid, and you can't fight destiny."

There was a quick flash of light as a car whizzed by the alley. In the distance a car alarm went off.

"How am I supposed to tell him that, though?" Hagrid asked wearily as he inhaled the fumes of his cigarette butt. "What if he doesn't believe me?"

"You know Harry Potter like you know no other man."

There was a smash of glass and a car alarm went off.

"He is not prepared." Hagrid replied.

"None of us were. But events are moving too quickly, and we must move on him before they do" Kevin said as he climbed the ladder of a fire escape and sat in the darkness, with "they" being emphasized emphatically, like it was written in italics.

The two sat there in silence.

In the distance, a dog began barking.

"Alright, I guess I have no choice." Hagrid sighed as he dropped the empty cigarette. He ground it beneath his foot like an orphan's face.

"I'll be in touch once it's done." Kevin said. He then turned and began walking out of the alley.

"I'm going to find him…" Hagrid whispered as he turned and started making his way to the other side of the alley, "… and when I do…"

He clicked the lighter shut.

It was raining out. The rain rapped against the tin roof of the corrugated tin metal shack. Harry couldn't sleep. Something was off, he could feel it. Dudley snored loudly next to him, sprawled out on a mattress. They had had lost nearly everything.

On the advice of William Taggart, Vernon and Penny had fled the United England and come to hide in the United States. It had been brutal thus far, living in poverty in a foreign country, with no common ground or even a common language. They quickly fell to the bottom rung of society and held on with their teeth to prevent falling any further.

Harry wondered if he would dream that night. In his mind of minds he could see the nightmares he had had in the past, about cold metal running in rivulets down his wrists, up his arms, smothering his face with the glossy, glass-like reflections cast on the metal as it poured down his throat. Harry did not like to dream. He tossed, restlessly, watching the shadows move across the ceiling as cars sped past on the nearby bypass.

Suddenly there was a noise.

Harry sat bolt upright and reached under a pile of grubby laundry for his 34. Automatic. He aimed it at the door. Then the door opened, revealing the silhouette of a gigantically proportioned man backlit against the neon.

*Click* *Click*

"Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, Harry, You nearly shot me." Hagrid said as he stood in the doorway, outlined against the city lights and his wet, rain-soaked navy blue raincoat was soaked from the rain and dripping wet.

Harry lay back and tossed the gun aside, where it fired twice in quick succession, punching holes in the corrugated wall. He stared at the ceiling with his eyes closed as the shots ricocheted around the tent camp.

"What do you want, Hagrid?" Harry asked wearily, resigned, without hope.

"You need to know."

Harry sat up again, reaching for a shirt. If he must endure this, he would do so without his nipples being exposed.

"Know what?"

"There's no easy way to tell you this."

"Tell me what?"

"It's going to be hard, harry. Verrry hard." Hagrid replied, rolling his "r" with gusto.

Harry pulled on a grubby shirt and looked at Hagrid with suspicion in his eyes and his body language..

"Tell me what?" he asked again, this time conveying his urgent impatience.

"There's no easy way to tell you this." Hagrid said again.

Harry and Hagrid stared at each other in silence for what seemed an eternity. Then Hagrid began.

"Ten years ago, at the Black Mesa Research Facility, the event horizon began."

Harry went cross-eyed, and tried to shut the memories out. Staring at the floor, he spoke.

"I don't care about that, Hagrid. It was in the past. Sure, the hospital bill was high but I want to forget, Hagrid."

Hagrid stared long and hard at Harry before he began again.

"There's no easy way to tell you this."

"Tell me what?"

"Ten years ago, during the Black Mesa incident, you were fatally injured, but you went to the hospital."

"The price was expensive but I am alive. So what?"

"Harry," Hagrid hesitated. "Harry, the cost was your humanity."

"What do you mean?"

"You're a Hanzer, Harry."

"I'm a what?"

"A cyborg, Harry. A machine."

Harry stared at Hagrid with a cold expression. The cameras that were his eyes dilated.

"I never asked for this."


	2. Chapter 2

Hagrid was on his motorcycle. It was raining and his dark green overcoat was covered in rain and water. It was raining out.

Harry and Hagrid sat on a subway train in silence for what seemed like eternity. The subway car they were in was empty save for them. Hagrid flicked the lighter on and lit his cigarette.

"You want a smoke?" He asked Harry.

"Yeah." Harry responded, as he hadn't yet come to terms with the news that he was a cybrog. He was going to need a couple cigarettes or two. Weakly, he accepted the cigarette and gazed out the window at the passing city street.

There was a buzzing noise coming from Hagrids pocket. He took out his PDA and opened it. It was a message from Kevin,

_Are you at Hogwarts yet? Dumbledore has an urgent message for you._

After reading the message Hagrid shooed away the owl that brought it.

"So where are you taking me?" Harry asked impatiently. "We were going to have spaghetti for supper and I don't want to miss it."

"I'm afraid you won't be going back any time soon." Hagrid said, flicking the lighter closed, "It's too dangerous and there's someone you need to see. He will explain everything."

"Where?"

"I'm taking you to a secret facility called Hogwarts. It's a secret science facility where scientists can help you. But it's a secret so no one can know." Hagrid responded. Harry pondered this imponderable of ponderables.

As they approached the next stop, the crowd in the subway car they were in pressed around them, a teeming human mass of thoughtless corporate drones.

"Why did we have to sit near the door?" Harry mumbled.

Hagrid put his PDA back in his pocket.

The moon was hidden behind clouds. It started to rain.

The subway car stopped and a mass of bodies quickly escaped the confines of the metal snake. They were probably all going home. Harry wondered if he'd ever return to his home. He wondered where his true home really was, and if it even still existed.

"How much further until we reach Hogwarts?" Harry was cold and impatient.

"It's still a while yet." Hagrid said as he offered Harry another cigarette.

It was going to be a long night.

Rain ran down the steps of the subway station, pouring like a river. The sky wept. It was as if God had seen what men had done with themselves for the first time. Harry and Hagrid emerged from the Subway station. The streetlights flickered.

"I could use a cigarette." Harry said.

Hagrid reached into his coat to take out a cigarette. From out of the darkness of the street, Punks in hoodies holding baseball bats, tire irons, whoopee cushions and spraypaint cans filtered towards them.

"Looks like somebody picked the wrong neighborhood to walk through" said their leader.

Hagrid calmly pulled out his 52. Revolver and blew the top off of the thugs head, then slammed two more slugs into his belly in quick succession for good measure. The thugs ran at them screaming, weapons aloft as Hagrid dispensed thundery justice with his 52. Harry frantically pulled out his 32. Automatic and dropped it as a thug grabbed him by his long, ash blond hair and shook him. Hagrid grabbed a parking meter, ripped it out of the ground and brought it down on his head, and the thug collapsed, his head a red ruin.

"Thanks" said Harry.

"Don't mention it."

"I appreciate it"

Harry and Hagrid unloaded on the men attacking them. Hagrid fired shot after shot but they kept coming. BLAM. BLAM. BLAM. BLAM. BLAM. BLAM. BLAM. BLAM. BLAM. BLAM. BLAM. BLAM. BLAM. BLAM BLAM. BLAM. BLAM .BLAM BLAM. BLAM BLAM. BLam. BLam. And then Hagrid stopped to reload behind a car.

Suddenly a ninja with a rocket launcher jumped out of the shadows. Harry shot at him but the ninja shot the rocket at the car that hagrid was standing next to but he was too late. The car exploded, a ball of shrapnel, glass and gasoline fury. Hagrid screamed and fell backwards. Harry shot the ninja in the face and he fell down.

His gun fell from his hand. That was the last of them.

"Hagrid, no!" yelled Harry. He reached down and held Hagrid in his arms, gazing into his eyes. Hagrid coughed.

"I never thought it would be like this. Damn snatchers..." Hagrid coughed, and a thin trickle of blood began to slide down his face from the corner of his mouth.

"Hagrid, I'm so sorry."

"Listen, Harry. You need to know this…Hogwarts may not seem like a good place, but it is and you need to go there."

Suddenly Harry's phone rang. It was his family. Harry side-buttoned them.

The rain fell down in a torrent, steam rising from the sewer grates and water washing away the blood down the drains. Harry looked at Hagrid.

"I wish it was some other way, Harry, but you'll have to go on alone. It's a tough burden to bear but you'll have to do it. I…I am dying, Harry. I can't fight destiny and destiny calls for me."

"I never asked for this." Harry said and Hagrid died. After a moment, Harry stood up and walked away, leaving Hagrid's body to lie in the puddling rain.


	3. Chapter 3

The castle-like towers of Hogwarts appeared on the horizon as Harry, who was wet from the rain, reached the top of a hill. He was almost there. He kicked his motorcycle up a gear. A little present from the late Hagrid, it was a state of the art machine used for navigating the city streets at a mean speed. Hagrid had wired a bomb into the sidecar, so if it was ever tampered with, it would explode. Harry thought it was a nice touch.

It had been raining for what seemed like hours now and Harry was soaked.

It was quiet, too quiet for a rainy night. Harry looked around him. Left, right, then left again. He looked up, then left. The walls of the buildings that encased the streets were covered in decades worth of grime and graffiti. A mural depicted numerous indecipherable gang tags and what appeared to be a cartoon woman performing a lewd act with an anthropomorphic dalmatian.

This place is disgusting, Harry thought.

Once upon a time, these streets were clean. Before the Black Mesa incident, everything was nice, children would play in the streets and their mothers wouldn't fear for them. Things sure had changed, Harry reflected. The night air was heady with the scent of freshly fallen rain and gasoline, the faint traces of fried food and diesel fuel.

Harry was lost in memories of a better time. He thought about his family, about Vernon, Penny and Nicole. Would he ever see them again?

The streetlights went out with a flicker.

He heard footsteps coming from the alley he was passing. Harry paused. He saw what looked like a flash of reflected light from the alley. Harry reacted quickly and reached for his 32. automatic, pointing it down the alleyway

The footsteps stopped suddenly, only to start again more slowly. A voice came from the alleyway.

"Calm down, I'm not going to hurt you."

"Who are you?" Harry asked.

From the shadows of the alley into the tungsten lighting of the rain soaked sidewalk, a boy appeared. Harry saw he was red haired and freckled and was the same age as Harry. He could tell from the red hair and elongated nose that the boy was probably of Irish-Jewish descent, like Fagin from _Oliver Twist_. He wore a long black trench coat, a wrist mounted computer that glowed with blue neon, and lit a cigarette for himself.

"Do you want a cigarette?" He asked Harry, taking one out and holding it out in front of him.

"Yeah." Harry replied, putting his 32. away and taking the cigarette from the boys hand. Harry lit the cigarette with his wand.

"My name is Ron Weasley." Said the boy. "Dumbledore sent me to come looking for you. He got worried when Hagrid didn't respond to his text. Where is Hagrid anyway?"

Harry didn't respond, but his expression, while stoical and unreadable, spoke volumes.

"Oh." Ron nodded understandingly.

There was a brief pause.

"We should get going." Ron said as the streetlights began slowly flickering back on. "They're all waiting for you."

Ron jabbed at his wristcomp hurriedly. Harry briefly spotted him rebooting an executable labeled " ", before he began typing into some sort of internet relay chat program.

"I'm just telling Dumbledore I've found you and we're on our way."

Moments later, they were staring at the double-doored entrance to the facility.

"Are you ready?" Ron asked.

Harry took a deep breath, knowing that once he passed through these doors, his life would be changed irrevocably.

Moments later, Harry stood awkwardly in the foyer. Ron introduced him to Dr. Reed, but Harry already knew her. She was the doctor that operated on him after he was horribly burned in the Black Mesa Incident. And here she was. She wore a tan trench coat with a high collar, which outlined her brown hair and narrow face. She wore a wristwatch and dark red nail polish as fashion statements.

"Harry, I'm glad that you're okay." She smiled sweetly. "I'm sorry to hear about Hagrid."

"Well…I'm here now, that's what matters." said Harry awkwardly.

Then Dumbledore came. He swept into the room, dressed in a purple business suit. The end of his cigar was a smoldering ember, a point of light in the fluorescent gloom of the facility lights. "I'm glad that you're here, Harry." he said warmly, eyes twinkling over his crescent moon glasses.

"I don't know if I'm glad or not. Hagrid would have wanted it this way, though." Harry said, and he reached out and shook Dumbledore's hand. He had a firm grip for a man of his age, and Harry couldn't help noticing that Dumbledore was solidly built and handled himself well. He reminded Harry of an elephant, all ivory and trunk, powerful and gray.

"Harry, we have a problem."

"What?" asked Harry.

"UNATCO has stolen a secret device we had from the Black Mesa facility."

"Oh no!" said Harry. UNATCO were a bunch of bad guys who did bad things. Dr. Reed looked scared, so Harry tried to look manly. "Don't worry Dumbledore" He said. "I will get the device." He immediately wondered why he'd said that. Don't get involved, he reminded himself, keep your head down.

Dumbledore was pleased. Clearly, he had said exactly what they had hoped. "It's good to have you, Harry. Why don't you make yourself comfortable, until Ron can show you around. You'll be based out of our hub of operations, so I'm sure you'd like to take a look." and with that, Dumbledore withdrew, leaving Ron to lead Harry away to an elevator.

Then Harry and Ron walked to the dormitory, as designated by a pictogram of a man sleeping on a bed, and went inside. Inside the shades had been pulled back and the streetlights lit the back of the walls with a half-light. Rain beat against the window panes, steadily and with conviction. The glass was leaded, a darkened shade that let only a little light through, so shadows danced through the room, and only the tiny, harshly bright lights of a few computer monitors lit the space. Ron turned to Harry. "Harry" he said "About Reed…?"

"Forget it." He said. "It's in the past and I want to forget. I loved her once and you took her away. Let's leave it in the ground."

"I just wanted to-"

"I don't care what you wanted!" Harry snapped. "You left me broken hearted. I'm not even sure I feel anything, because I'm a machine! I DON'T FEEL ANYTHING ANY MORE!"

Harry flung himself down on the carpet and wept. Ron withdrew, shaking his head and lighting a cigarette.

Later, when Harry felt better, he stood up and walked over to the refrigerator and pulled out a container of chocolate ice cream and a spoon. Then he walked into the bathroom and stared at his mirror.

It was broken.

Like his soul.

Harry opened the ice cream and looked at it.

The spoon lowered.

That night, Harry vomited twice. He lay crying on the floor of the bathroom. Singing softly to himself, until he fell asleep.

He dreamed he was falling down a long dark tunnel. At the top, falling away from him, was a bright light. The roar of a lion reverberated through the dark tunnel, as he woke up. Harry realized with a start that the alarm was going off throughout the facility! He fell out of bed into a puddle of his own vomit.

The noise was deafening. Harry quickly rose into a half-crouch and grabbed his 32. revolver. He ran, dripping, out of his room and heard gunfire from down the hall. As he approached he saw Ron crouching by the door in his pyjamas and a trench coat. He reloaded the submachine gun he was holding and lit another cigarette.

"Stormtroopers are raiding the facility!" Ron yelled as he threw a grenade through the door and ran in after it.

Harry followed Ron into the room. Gunfire was all around him. He ducked behind a table and returned fire. There were at least a dozen stormtroopers but Ron and Harry made quick work of them, their ceramic white armor flying off in chips as the slugs slammed into them. Harry briefly wondered, in the middle of the firefight, why they bothered with body armor if it was so ineffective. The impersonal nature of conflict manifested itself eloquently as the white ceramic was stained red by the indignities man inflicted upon one another.

They could hear gunfire coming from the Great Hall. Harry and Ron ran towards the Great Hall, shooting seven more stormtroopers and killing them.

Harry kicked open a door that opened into a courtyard. It was raining heavily, the foliage dripping wet from the rain. Harry and Ron walked out slowly into the light fog. It was silent, save for the gunfire. There was a fountain in the center. As Harry and Ron reached it Harry washed the blood off of his hands and feet. He fought dirty, and the blood has soaked into his trench coat.

Suddenly, the sound of a helicopter starting filled the air. Harry climbed up on top of a tree and saw there was a helicopter on the roof of Hogwarts. Dr. Reed had been taken hostage! She was screaming and crying but as soon as she saw Harry she stopped and yelled, "Harry! You need to-"

"Shut up you bitch!" A well-dressed man yelled, hitting her in the head with the butt of his pistol, knocking her out cold.

Harry ran towards them and began shooting. He missed and they got in the helicopter and flew away.

"Harry! We need to get to Dumbledore, he can help us!" Ron yelled, running towards the doors of the Great Hall.

Harry nodded and joined Ron as they approached the doors.

The large double-doors to the Great Hall were closed. An ominous silence descended like a bird of prey. The gunfire coming from the other side of the doors was loud and deafening. Harry looked at Ron who looked at Harry.

They nodded and kicked the doors open.


	4. Chapter 4

Some time later, Harry, Ron, Dr. Reed, Hagrid and Dumbledore sat in Dumbledore's office suite. They had all been called for a meeting concerning UNATCO. The electric fan on Dumbledore's desk hissed mournfully, casting an enormous rotating-fan shadow on the far wall. Outside of the shaded window, rain beat against the side of the building and ran down in rivulets. Outside, it was raining.

Harry hesitated.

"Dumbledore, we know UNATCO has stolen the Point Entanglement High Density Mass Effect Field Generator, the PEHDMEFG. And I'm supposed to go get it."

"Yes, Harry."

"But I'm only eleven! What makes me qualified to go get it?"

Hagrid leaned in. "Harry, it's destiny. You can't fight destiny."

Dr. Reed let out a plume of smoke from her sultry mouth where she had been smoking. "Harry, your augmented. You have all the tools from the job."

Harry looked upset. "I AM NOT AUGMENTED!" he yelled. Then he stood up and ran out of the room through a plate glass window, fury radiating off him like heat off a radiator. None of them understood. None of them 'got' him.

Hagrid came to him sulking in a shadowy corner of the great hall. Dr. Kleiner was there eating a shrimp and salad sandwich. Hagrid offered Harry a cigarette, which he silently accepted. The two stood there for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, Hagrid said "Harry. You need to know."

"Know what?"

"Your parents…they didn't die in a car crash."

"Yeah, I know. Voldemort killed them."

"No, not that, either. It was UNATCO's C.E.O., Dr. Frankenstein."

Harry was so surprised, he nearly dropped his cigarette. He stared at Hagrid, his eyes wide and watery. The two of them stood in silence for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, Harry said "So I guess I have to do this." Hagrid smiled happily.

The two returned to the office where Ron, Dr. Reed and Dumbledore were playing Russian roulette. "Oh, you're back." Said Ron, who put the gun down from the desk where it went off, blowing a hole in Dumbledore's velvet Elvis wall hanging.

Dumbledore winced wisely. "So will you do it, harry? Will you go to UNATCO to retrieve the PEDMEHFG, ASAP?"

Harry nodded.

Harry Potter sat in the train in silence. He lit a cigarette for himself and let one leg hang off the side of the helicopter. Ron was sitting next to him. He had offered to come and help, but Harry knew he had to do this alone. Ron was to run mission control from the helicopter, and if things got too dicey he would deploy smart missiles, but the hands-on work was all Harry's job.

The rain was pouring down in torrents. There was a flash of lightening and then a boom of thunder soon after.

There was a storm brewing, Harry thought.

"Are you sure about this?" Ron asked.

"It's not like I have a choice."

"But there are other ways, if you want I could come and he-"

Harry shook his head, "No, Ron. This is the only way."

Ron sighed and lit and took a long puff from his cigarette. They sat in silence. Harry could see the UNATCO building approaching through the city's glitz and neon. Bread and circuses, Harry reflected, kept the masses properly opiated so they would not rebel against the society that held them in bondage and electrocuted their nipples.

Hagrid stopped the motorcycle, "This is as close as I'm going." He said.

Harry nodded and jumped out of the helicopter and slammed into the ground below. It didn't hurt him because he was augmented, though concrete splinters and rebar pilings went flying a fair distance.

He looked at the building before him. The building was a tall, black leviathan of human loathing. It was as if all the hatred of humankind was put into the architecture of this building. The darkened glass glittered malevolently, a stygian obsidian pillar of human suffering, rising above the city skyline in a massive middle finger to all of humanity. Harry took one final stride from his cigarette and threw it off the cliff beside him. His hat was already soaked from the rain. His tan overcoat was dripping wet from the storm.

"Remember what I taught you, Harry." Hagrid reminded him before turning his car around and speeding off. Little did he know it was the last time he would ever see Ron alive.

Harry knew that just barging in wouldn't be a good idea. He would have to use the ventilation shafts.

He kicked out the cover of a vent and jumped in. It was cramped and smelled horrible.

Harry began making his way through the sewers into the heart of the UNATOCO facility. He had memorized the layout of the sewers and knew exactly how to bypass the security of the building.

This was going to be a piece of cake.

Harry crouched in the four foot-square ventilation shafts, listening to the conversation in the room below him. He had snuck into the squat, brick UNATCO headquarters through the entrance of the sewers. Why anyone would willingly connect their ventilation system to a sewer was beyond Harry, though it seemed a common design decision in these post-freedom days.

_Maybe Frankenstein is just crazy_, thought Harry, _or maybe he's just a sick bastard._

But that was besides the point. The doctor was talking to his Lieutenants in the office below. Cigarette smoke filtered up through the vent. It reminded Harry that it had been at least ten minutes since his last.

"But is it secure?" Dr. Frankenstein asked.

"Yes, Boss. The PEHDOFAGH is secure in the safe and only I know the code." said his Lieutenant, a tall man in a black trench coat. He was wearing sunglasses. Then they all stood up and left. Harry crawled through the vent, his augments tracking them by their heartbeat, respiration and also their breathing. He saw the lieutenant go into the bathroom and so he crawled to the vent overlooking his stall.

While the lieutenant was urinating, Harry lowered himself on a rope hanging upside down behind the lieutenant. He silently slid a knife from his pocket, reached around and shanked the lieutenant in the genitals.

A howl of rage, pain and fear emanated from the bathroom. The guards did nothing. It was known the lieutenant had a kidney stone problem.

Harry and the Lieutenant smashed through the stall and into the bathroom. The lieutenant grabbed Harry by the leg and swung him overhead into a porcelain sink, which shattered. Harry felt blood run down the back of his neck. He flipped his hand back to reveal the gun concealed inside his forearm and blew three holes in the lieutenants chest, hot plasma glowing in three blue circles on the opposite wall.

The lieutenant fell down, twitching spasmodically.

Suddenly the Lieuenant turned into a cyborg bear! It roared and harry shot it with his 34. Repeater but it was no use. A massive cyber-paw threw Harry into a stall which collapsed like a girl scout's campfire. Harry moeaned. Then, he jump kicked the bear in the face.

Harry held the lieutenant by the collar.

"WHAT IS THE CODE" Harry yelled.

"It's 4433443344587433556335773" said the lieutenant.

Harry dropped the lieutenant on the floor and climbed back into the ventilation system, as silently as he came. No one was the wiser.

Harry made his way through the maintenance tunnels to the vault in the subbasement of the facility. He climbed down from the rafters in the ceiling. The guards were fast asleep and snored loudly. Rain was pouring in from the open window and a puddle was quickly forming on the floor.

Harry walked over to the large blast doors. The keypad was beeping and there was a red light blinking on it. Harry punched in the code.

"43344387659323802143444" Harry mumbled as he punched in the numbers. The beeping stopped and the blinking red light was replaced by a solid green light.

The doors began to open. Creaking loudly, metal grinding against metal, the doors opened slowly. With a crash and a loud bang, the doors were open. Harry wandered in and saw the PIHPFAHG lying on a shelf.

Harry looked around the vault. There were shelves full of gold, and money and currency of every kind. There were filing cabinets that no doubt contained all of UNATCOs deep, dark secrets. The walls were covered in skulls and freshly severed heads. Ron almost vomited at the sight of them.

The doctor was a sick, sick man.

Harry grabbed the POWRSAH and put it in his pocket. He turned around and closed the wrought iron doors of the vault. The doors closed silently.

There was a loud beeping noise followed by silence. Harry knew what was about to happen and ran out the door onto the roof. The rain was pouring down in torrents. God was no doubt mourning what man had done with this world. Fifty stories high Harry could see the entire city. The flickering streetlights outlined the streets below in an unnatural orange glow.

The alarm began blaring behind him.

There was only one way Harry could escape.

He would have to jump.

Harry dreamed. In his dream he was flying. He had great white wings like a duck or a swan or another kind of water fowl native to north American climates he grew up in, possibly with some pigeon thrown in there.

But anyways he was flying towards the sun. And then his wings melted and he fell down. It was like the Greek myth Icarus, and there was symbolism, Harry knew, about technology and hubris.

And Harry jumped.

Glass shards danced sparkling in the air and fell with the rain to the pavement below. The rain beat down in a toccata, though Harry was in too much of a fugue to notice. The streetlights glimmered in the half-light of an overcast dawn. Distantly, the smokestacks of the city smoked smoke into the Chicago sky.

And Harry took flight, the sleek, black metal flight system extending from his sleek, black metal shoulder-blades. A flock of pigeons flew up from the alley as he drifted, faster and faster towards the ground.

Closer and closer, until he landed. He rolled with the impact, the wings retracting back into his body with a smart snap. Then, he walked out of the alley onto the highwat. A motorcyclist drove past so Harry grabbed him and threw him back down the alley, got onto the motorcycle and drove away. Then, he lit a cigarette and began called Dumbledore on his cellphone, dodging and weaving through traffic. He glanced in his rear view mirror and blanched. He was being pursued.


	5. Chapter 5

Behind him, a fleet of men on motorcycles, armed with powersaws, chain swords and nun-chucks zoomed at him. Harry applied more throttle, and with a flick of his arm, deployed his subdermal glass knife from his forearm. Snatchers. Harry loathed snatchers. The very concept was antithetical to his very being.

They preyed on the weak, the helpless augmented cyborgs. They would accost innocent men and women and brutally cut the augmented parts from their body to be sold on the black market, to the highest bidder. These foul men would also sell out their services as mercenaries to the corporations. Harry reflected that they were a product of their environment, that society was truly to blame, but one squashed fruit flies if they were drawn to a rotten orange all the same.

Harry jinked to the right, then the left, then the left again. The snatchers barely kept pace with him, being more brawn than brain, but he knew he couldn't easily lose them in a pursuit, so he opted for plan B. He slammed on the breaks and flung his arms out in a T shape, neatly cutting the men in the lead into crimson crescents of viscous fluid. The others peeled off abruptly, braking hard as Harry slid to a stop. With an elegant flick, blood flew off his subdermals.

A man in a red bandanna yelled at him. "Potter, you freak! Dr. Frankenstein sends his regard!" and he threw a molotov cocktail at Harry. Harry dived, rolling away from his motorcycle as it went up in a great conflagration. Quickly, he rose and dived off the edge of the raised highway, falling two stories into the teeming slums. A pair of prostitutes, one female and garishly enhanced and the other of indeterminate gender regarded him with bored bemusment as Harry shook himself off and set off into the maze of the undercity.

Harry ducked into a tiny autophone stall. It smelled of urine and stale alchohol, but it would do. Normally they were locked, safe consoles for making local video calls with, but Harry had something else in mind. A line like this was easily tapped, the console was likely treasonous, and Harry had reason to believe he was being tracked. He sliced open the base of the console where the wires met the box, and spliced his PDA onto it. Rapid button presses rewarded him with a decoy signal sending false information, while he used the piggybacked signal to also send a message to Dumbledore via a torrent internet proxy firewall.

But Dr. Reed answered instead, leaving Harry surprised and breathless "Hello, this is Megan. Dumbledore's not in his office right now." she said blithely.

Harry hesitated, cigarette in one hand. "Megan. I…I have the PEDROFOGH." He settled for getting straight to the point. He had questions, sure. Like why Megan would answer Dumbledore's private phone. He imagined her wearing only a robe, lying on Dumbledore's purple bedsheets, one breast exposed as she languidly conversed with him on the phone. He swallowed, pressing down the swelling of emotions in his brain and other places.

"Oh, Harry, that's fantastic."

"I did what I had to do." Harry said, gesturing with his cigarette for emphasis, although it was futile because Megan was talking to him through Dumbledore's PDA and couldn't actually see what he was doing. He cut the line. Succinct, he thought. Brief, to the point, professional. All the same, he was glad she couldn't see his glazed, steamed over expression or the tell-tale swelling in his groinal region.

An hour later, Harry parked the autocab at a Chinese restaurant and had French fries and octopus balls. He ate with chopsticks because he was very cultured. He could speak Chinese without an accent. He read a newspaper. In it, Dr. Frankenstein was being heralded as a hero and pioneer of technological research. Harry spat in the gutter and his phlegm ran down with the rain into the drains. The waiter regarded him with stoical curiosity. These foreign types, thought the waiter, so inscrutable are their ways.

Then Harry went to the Woolworth's department store and bought himself a red wool sweater.

When Harry got back Dumbledore was waiting for him at the door of Hogwarts. He was almost sticking his head out of the foyer, such was his anticipation."Harry, I see you have it." Dumbledore said, rubbing his hands together anxiously in anticipation.

"Yes."

"Give it to me." There was something about his actions, Harry thought, that indicated an urgent need, a desire in Dumbledore that made him uneasy. Or maybe it was his imagination. Just today men had tried to kill him and sell his body parts on the black market. He was being paranoid.

Harry gave the PEONCHILD to Dumbledore and Dumbledore smiled happily. This was perfect, he thought. The clouds drifted apart and Harry could see the sunlight in beams through the clouds. Megan smiled at him. "Maybe being augmented is not so bad, Harry" she said. Harry stared at her and the clouds hid the sun again. "I'm dying Megan." He said "These augments are slowly killing me." he said.

And then they had cigarettes. Harry's trenchcoat got soaked.

Harry went to Dumbledore's office and he gave the PILEDRIVR to Dumbledore. Dumbledore was pleased and offered Harry a cigarette.

"No thanks, I quit smoking." Harry told Dumbledore, who frowned. Harry left Dumbledore's office with questions on his mind, the puzzle swirling around. He was close, he knew it. Anything could trigger a solution, any word, any phrase. He was exhausted.

Harry just wanted to go back to his room and sleep. He needed to think things over. He never thought he'd run into Ginny at UNATCO. Ginny, who had killed Fred and George. Harry loved her.

Harry walked into his room. It was dark, save for the glow of the street from the window. It was raining and drops of rain were sliding down the dark glass that was a picture frame to someone's cruel nightmare. Harry reached in the darkness for the light switch and flicked it on.

"Surprise!"

Harry jumped back. He sure was surprised. The room was decorated with balloons and other decorations.

All of Harry's friends were there. Ron, Vernon, Dudley, Hagrid and Dr. Reed were there. They were all smoking and Harry decided to light a cigarette for himself.

"Happy 12th birthday, Harry!"

There was cake and presents and even games like pin-the-beard-on-Dumbledore, Harry's favorite game.

Harry opened his presents. He got some of his favorite cigarettes from Hagrid. Ron gave his a McDonalds gift card. Harry opened Dr. Reed's present. It was a book. Harry hated books. When he saw the title, Harry hated books even more. _Living With Your New Augmentation: A Tale of Two Cities_.

Harry threw the book across the room. The music stopped and everybody stared at him.

"You can't keep doing this to yourself, Harry. You need to accept who you are." Dr. Reed said, putting her arm around Hagrid.

"I can't, Dr. Reed. These augments are killing me! It's like I have AIDS!" Harry screamed, tears began to form in his eye ducts.

"You don't have AIDS, Harry. You can still go to the bathroom!" Ron protested. He lit another cigarette and gave it to Harry, who smoked it furiously.

"I guess you're right." Harry said.

Everyone cheered. The music began again and the party was a success.

Harry sighed and slammed his head down on the table, right into the cake.

He was fast asleep.


	6. Chapter 6

Harry and Doctor Kleiner stood in the test chamber. Dr Kleiner was stroking his robust black beard and thinking. Rain poured down the windows in rivulets, hammering against the panes like a child with a hammer who had just discovered ice sculpting for the first time and was trying to make a functional truck with a hammer and chisel. Dumbledore was there too.

Then Dumbledore nodded and Harry placed the SWINEPOOR on the floor and pressed a red button on it. Dr. Kleiner hooked up a power cable and the Entanglement field opened.

Suddenly Dumbo laughed. It was an evil laugh, fel and terrible, and Harry's social augumentation was going haywire. Through the entanglement field Harry saw three moons hovering over a martian hellscape. Firey fire burned on the land. Harry could see a giant facility rising out of the martian hellscape, brutal brown cement in a sea of embers.

"Dumbledore, what's happening? The entanglement field was supposed to open up a portal to Xen! Not…wherever this is."

Dr Kleiner stared in fascination and horror. "That is Phobos, Harry, a moon of Mars!"

Dumbledore laughed. "You see, Harry" he said as a he lit a cigar "I don't care about black mesa. I only want war."

Harry felt tears fill his eyes.

"I TRUSTED YOU!" He screamed nationalistically.. Dr. Kleiner shielded himself with his arms. "You see harry, I am actually DIABLO, LORD OF TERROR!" He yelled, and his hair split and horns popped out. Along a central seam of his chest, bulging red muscles, an impossibly big creature of horns and teeth and malevolent evil sprouted forth and then Dumbledore was Diablo. A talon-ridden hand smashed into Harry, and he was knocked senseless. Another grab, and Diablo flung Harry through the portal. "Now you cannot interfere. This world...is mine!" Diablo laughed. A black, evil laugh that reverberated through the portal.

Then everything went black as the darkest night of the year in November when the moon isn't there and it's cloudy but the dark kind of cloudy. Harry woke up in an unfamiliar room. Hermione was there.

"Harry I'm so sorry this has happened." She said tearfully.

"Where am I?" asked Harry.

"You're in hell harry." said Hermione.

"Hell?" asked Harry, pulling himself into a sitting up position, as contagiousness fully returned to him.

"Hell." said Hermione.

Then it was true. Dumbledore had played them for fools and was actually Diablo. Harry sat up and reached for his 34. Automatic. He held it against his temple and cried. Hermione looked sad. The last time Harry saw her she was a proud wizard who shot lightning from her hands and wasn't afraid of anybody. Now she was a shell of her former self. He loved her. Rain beat against the window panes.

She knelt, and embraced Harry.


	7. Chapter 7

Cole Phelps sat in his office, a thin plume of smoke rising in a snaking line from his cigarette. His tie was thrown on and his collar was unbuttoned, his jacket on the back of his armchair. A half empty bottle of scotch, his closest lover, lay on his desk. Behind him, a series of negatives was strung up, clothespinned to a string. A desklamp lit the scene with sharp, contrasting shadows.

Cole turned the photo over in his hands. On the back, it said "_HermioneandCole,1933_". He sighed softly and reached for his scotch. Rain beat against the windows like it was a domestic violence case. As he lay back in his armchair, bottle raised above his head, he wondered how it had all gone wrong.

And then the phone rang.

Phelps was so surprised he dropped his cigarette AND his bottle of scotch. Hastily, he stood up, staggered across the room and grabbed the receiver. "Phelps and Ga-Phelps" he said, cursing himself for forgetting his old partner was gone. "Private Investigator."

"Cole Phelps," a mysterious, deep voiced man said "I hear you are the best there is."

"I do my best sir" said Cole.

"I need you to come into my workplace. Recently, something of great value was stolen from me. Something I can't just go to the police about."

"What was stolen?" asked Cole, already doing detective work. He flipped his notepad open and propped it on one knee.

"I can't tell you over the pho-"

"Hold it, mister! You think you can lie to me like that? I ought to _breakyourfuckingjaw_! YOU STOLE YOUR MISSING THING! I'm pretty damn sure that you took a bribe from an official to steal it, and now you're trying to pin it on some other sap to try and shift the blame away! WHY DID YOU DO IT?"

The voice on the other end of the phone paused incredulously. "What possible evidence do you have of this?"

Cole Phelps looked down at his notepad. _Damn_. "Uh. I made a mistake."

A long, drawn out sigh emitted from the receiver, a snowstorm in static. "I can tell this is going to be the beginning of a long and happy partnership, Cole. Just get yourself down to UNATCO headquarters. Ask for Dr. Frankenstein when you get there."

"261 in progress at corner of Chan and Lemonde" the police scanner blared into the inside of Cole's police car, where he was sitting because he was driving. Cole was smoking a cigarette. Cole sighed when he heard the chime of the scanner and threw his empty bottle of scotch out of the window, where it shattered in a children's sandbox, and drove to the scene.

Cole Phelps got out of the car to see two men fighting with ten foot knives on the lawn of a furniture store. A woman was screaming in the background, but Cole Phelps knew exactly what to do. He shouted three warnings in quick succession and drew his sidearm, took cover behind a bus, and then crawled under it and began unscrewing a fire extinguisher with his sidearm, like he had been trained to in police academy. The men put their knives away and sprinted into the store dropping bricks of cocaine as they ran, so Cole crawled out from underneath the bus and ran after them, firing warning shots into the crowd. The four smashed through a window into the street below, stumbling through a hotdog cart. When the hotdog vendor saw the five men running from Cole Phelps he pulled out his gun and shot the six men dead. Cole Phelps arrested all seven and left them cuffed to the phone poles as a warning to others. Then he climbed back into his car and drove away.

"Thanks, Cole" blared the police scanner "You really handled that robbery well."

"Robbery?" said Cole. "I thought it was a knife fight!"

"YOU MISSED THEM?" Cole's irish head-of-department screamed like a mentally-unstable hyena "WELL YOU BETTER GO BACK AND GET THEM!"

Cole switched the scanner off and performed a perfect U turn on the highway.

Cole Phelps stepped out of his police car onto the soaking pavement as the rain hammered down on the brim of his hat. The neon sign of the UNATCO company flickered on the side of the building. Men and women rushed down the street to get out of the rain, lit by the hellish pink glow of the neon. A doorman in a suit, soaking wet, called out to him.

"Phelps? The doctor is expecting you."

Cole walked up to the man and lit a cigarette. The two men turned and walked into the lobby, which contained several potted plants. The doorman turned and took Cole's cigarette. "I'm sorry, sir, but there's a strict no-smoking rule in place." Cole Phelps grunted. The secretary waved lazily from her desk, too busy smoking to say anything. Cole Phelps lit a cigarette.

The doorman walked over to an elevator and pressed the "666th floor" button, and the two stepped into the elevator. The doorman began to speak while straightening out Cole Phelp's tie.

"You will address him as Mr. Bellic or Sir. You will stand unless asked to be seated. Keep your sentences short and to the point. Are we clear?"

Cole Phelps only gulped. As the elevator door opened, Cole Phelps stepped out and the doorman said "And relax. He doesn't bite. Often." And with that the doorman closed the elevator door, hiding her from sight.

Dr. Frankenstein was sitting in a big leather armchair. His office was dark, his chair backlit by a great window that let in dim yellow streetlight from far below. It was shadowy, and Cole could only make out Dr. Frankenstein's glowing red left eye out of his silhouette. "Good evening Cole, I've been accepting you." he said, in a deep baritone voice.

"Yeah. So what was stolen?"

"I never said anything was stolen."

"Why else am I here?"

"Very perceptive, Mr. Phelps. Very perceptive." Dr. Frankenstein leaned forward, his hands folding into a steeple over his desk. His arms were visible in the light, and Cole noticed with some tension that the doctor's left hand was a metal prosthetic.

Dr. Frankenstein stood up, his frame disappearing into the darkness. "Follow me." he said. Twenty floors down, the two arrived at the UNATCO vault. The doctor gestured. "My PEGMEFG., it is gone."

"What's a POGFOGHF, doctor?"

"Let us say that it is a scientific device. All you need to know is that it looks like a lamp without a lampshade, roughly square in shape with four prongs extending from it at 90 degree angels."

Cole Phelps nodded. "I'll need to investigate."

The doctor smiled loftily, though he was still hidden within the shadows. His voice dripped with wry amusement. "Do your thing, Phelps."

Cole Phelps started by lighting a cigarette. After the Combine created the one-world-government there was only one kind of cigarette, the Metrocig. All other kinds were illegal, so everyone smoked Metrocigs. It was not possible to get any other kind of cigarette on earth. It was a hell of a thing, the way the Combine cracked down on man. A hell of a thing. Cole had seen a lot of things in his day when he fought in the war in Germany, but the things the Combine had done after the black mesa incident, they didn't even compare.

He took a moment to reflect, staring out the vault's open window into the street below, which was empty except for the cars streaming past in the rain. Dim streetlights lit the street with a dim light, and the rain poured down the building and dripped through the open window. The curtains drifted with the breeze.

After Cole felt the nicotine enter his bloodstream like a terrier in a turkey he carefully scanned the vault with his eyes. Not that he's augmented, just in a metaphorical sense in that he looked all around the room. He spotted the door's lock. It was broken. He went over and looked at it. It was broken. He held the shattered padlock in his hands with a curious expression. "What's this?"

He flipped his notepad open and wrote down "Broken Padlock" in the pages. Then, looking around, he spotted a collection of severed heads on the wall. He wandered over and held them, looking curious. He tilted a head left, then right, then left again, staring into the ear hole. "That's weird." he said, and replaced the head on the wall. Something didn't line up, something didn't feel right. It was like there was one vital clue missing, one thing to bring together the whole mess. One key piece to complete the mosaic that the criminal had inadvertently created.

On the floor was a cigarette butt. He leaned down and picked it up. His eyes narrowed. If ever Cole had seen totally damning evidence, it was here, in this room.

"Harry Potter."

It was a butt from Harry's favorite brand of cigarette.


	8. Chapter 8

"If it's all right with you, Dr. Frankenstein, I would like to take a look around the building before I go."

The doctor paused, the silence uncomfortable. Eventually, he said "Is this entirely necessary, inspector?"

Cole only nodded. The doctor was still, as Cole lit a cigarette under the scrutiny. "Fine. Have your look around." Cole only nodded and wandered off.

The evidence Cole had gathered was near-damning, but he needed a concrete case to bring against Potter. Cole knew that once, long ago, Potter had strong ties to Voldemort, because long ago Cole was part of the elite investigation wing operating under Dumbledore called "The order of the Phoenix." He wondered where Snape was, what his partner from so long ago was up to...if he was even still alive.

Cole stepped into the bathroom and looked around. The stalls were smashed like kindling and the porcelain urinals were covered in blood and smashed. Nothing screamed "Evidence" to him, but he paced back and forth across the room. He got out his fingerprint dust and rubbed it on the walls, floors, ceiling and stall wreckage. He found a lot of fingerprint markings and he put them in his notepad for later, just in case. But it probably wasn't enough. Cole sat down on the corpse of a cybernetic bear morosely. He must be missing something...but what? He sighed and lit a cigarette. Then he took out his cellphone and called the police station. "Phelps, badge twelve forty-seven."

The woman on the other end hesitated. "How can I help, detective?"

"I need to speak to my old police chief."

"Cole...you're not on the force any more."

Cole Phelps pulled into the police station parking lot, his police car siren wailing like some siren lost at sea on a rock tempting sailors to a drowning fate, which was appropriate because the rain was coming down in sheets of water. He stepped out of the car and into a puddle. He swore. Cole then parked the police car in a handicapped space and put ten cents in the parking meter.

He gazed up at the grey, brutal-brushed concrete finish of the police station. It reminded him of the Soviet gulags he saw back when he fought the Germans during his war days in Japan. The way the building just sucked the soul of the common man, the way it sucked up water and revealed itself to be spotty and dark, like a nerd at a ghetto school.

Cole Phelps hurried up the stairs and into the waiting room, where four men sat dejectedly around the waiting room. They had been arrested and were going to federal, pound-me-in-the-ass prison. In prison, Cole knew, men were raped every day. Cole Phelps did not want to go to prison.

He followed the old, familiar path to his lieutenant-major's office like an old friend. The door's window revealed a figure backlit, holding a telephone receiver in his mouth. Cole politely waited until the call was done.

"...not a surgeon-general. I'm a general!"

"...I know, I know."

"...Yes, I'll tell him...no, I...yes, fine, in bills..."

"...Same to you."

Cole watched as the shadow of his former captain placed the receiver down on the telephone stand. "Come in, Cole." he called, from inside the office where his voice emanated from. Cole started. He had forgotten that Mad-Eye had a magical eye that allowed him to see through windows that were opaque. Cole let himself into the office and sat down on a ragged cushioned chair across the desk from Mad-Eye. Mad-eye was wearing a blue suit and tie, and a half-empty bottle of scotch sat on his desk alongside a packet of metrocigs. Water beat against the window in a torrent, rivulets running down it like little rivers. "They're washing the windows." Cole remarked absently, wondering if Mad-Eye ever peeked at his package with his magic eye.

"It's been a long time, friend." Moody said.

"I...I don't have time for catching up. I need your help, Mad-eye." said Cole, watching as Mad-Eye's eye watched him. "You see, it's about this case I'm on..."

Mad-Eye's eye narrowed. "It's about Potter, isn't it?"

Cole nodded. "I need your help. This evidence, it all points in one direction. Can't you see that?" and Cole Phelps placed his evidence in several sheets and carefully written reports on Mad-Eye's desk.

Wordlessly, Mad-Eye picked up the papers and started reading them. He grunted. "Good." he said. He flipped a page over. "Damn good." he said. He nodded wordlessly once or twice, flipping through the pages. Once he had perused the stack to his satisfaction, he looked up at Cole.

"This is shit."

Mad-Eye chucked the evidence into a wastepaper basket, poured the scotch in with it, and then struck a match on Cole's lapel and threw it in after, causing the entire basket to catch flame. Cole's evidence went up in smoke in moments. The sprinklers went off.

As the water poured on the two, Mad-Eye lit a cigarette. "You cannot trust any of this. All this detective work, it was sloppy. Do it over. All over. And this time, do it carefully."

Cole gaped incredulously, but Mad-Eye only smiled. "You fuck! I ought to charge you with obstruction of justice!" Mad-Eye continued to smirk. "Bring it up with your superior, Cole. You know where my office is." Then Cole stormed out of the police station, kicking a chair over in the lobby and overturned a garbage can on the street on the way back. Then he noticed his car had been towed away. Cole sighed and stole a bicycle from the rack on the sidewalk.

As he pedaled away, his cellphone rang.

Cole lifted the cell phone to his ear and pressed the on button with his lobe. A soft female voice was on the other end, talking. "Hello? Is this the detective?" she asked.

"Phelps, badge…nothing any more. Who is this?"

"My name is Dr. Reed. I work for the Hogwarts research facility. We should talk."

Cole was so surprised he nearly dropped his cell phone. "A Hogwarts researcher? Why do you want to talk to me?" he asked, but Reed only laughed. "I worked on the MPEFGH, and have information that could help you. Would you like to meet for dinner?"

"Somewhere fancy, I hope." Cole replied.

"I was thinking McDonalds." replied Reed.

"Great. See you there." replied Cole, and he hung up and tucked his cellphone back in his jacket and pedaled away into the rain. L.A. was a very rainy city. It rained practically every day, or at least it felt like it did because it rained a lot. Statistically it probably didn't rain every day but nobody cares about statistics and most of them are made up anyway.

Cole took his bicycle down the road and pulled into a drug store parking lot. It was raining. Cole lit a cigarette and kicked his bicycle into a ditch. Then he walked into the drug store. There was a poster on the wall. On it, Dr. Kleiner was smoking a cigarette and the caption was "10 out of 10 doctors smoke METROCIG". Cole felt an uneasiness in his bones like a little boy with a firework. He hadn't felt this way about a woman since Hermione died after the war…after he lost his badge.

Cole had lost everything, but now he knew he was going to get to the bottom of this, and hopefully the bottom of Dr. Reed.

Rain streaked down the windows of the McDonalds like water on glass. Cole spotted Dr Reed lazily smoking a cigarette in a booth. He gestured to a waiter and the waiter went and dimmed the lights romantically. Then Cole walked up and pulled a red plush seat out and sat down on it.

"Dr. Reed" he said "So nice to finally meet you."

Dr Reed blew smoke in his face in a sultry manner and Cole coughed. Then the waiter walked up. Desperately, in a bid to control the situation, Cole ordered for them.

"We'll have the Red wine, I'll have the prime rib steak rare, and the lady will have the chicken Caesar salad, medium-rare. "

Dr. Reed regarded him coolly.

"So Cole… Tell me about Potter."

Cole looked up in surprise. "I was hoping you could tell me about him, Miss Reed."

Dr. Reed regarded him coolly.

"Potter is a riddle wrapped in a mystery hidden inside an enigma, wrapped in augments. He works for Dumbledore, the head of the Hogwarts research facility. Right now he is in Hell."

"Hell?" said Cole, raising an eyebrow.

"Forget I said that, Phelps" said Reed, and she put one hand over Cole's hand in a tender, romantic gesture that caused all the facts to leak out of Cole's head. "I just think you should know that Potter is working for Dumbledore. I KNOW he stole the MGEPUFIG from UNATCO, but I don't have evidence. When I heard you were researching it…" Dr Reed looked away, her face a mask of sadness and pain and injustice, like a kicked puppy.

Suddenly, Cole knew. "You love him, don't you?"

He felt hurt, like he had been betrayed. But what came next hurt him even more.

"Yes. I do. But he's working for Dumbledore now. Dumbledore is a bad man, Cole. An evil man. Who knows what he's using the MPROJEKT device for? It can't be anything good." Then Reed sighed and lit another cigarette, holding one in each hand with her painter's delicate hands. She was wearing green nail polish.

Cole stood up. He had heard enough. "Give me facts, Reed. Give me facts."

Reed looked hurt now, like everyone she trusted was a liar in a cold world where there was no trust to be had. "The code to get into the Hogwarts research facility is 666-666-666-666-666-666".

My god, thought Cole, the number of the beast – SQUARED! Cole picked up his steak and the bill and put them in his pocket and walked out, leaving Reed devastated in her chair. But Cole knew where he was going now. He knew what he needed to do. He knew what needed to by done by the one man who could do what must be done and he would do it because he had to because he was the only one to do it.

He would go back to his apartment and review the facts.


	9. Chapter 9

Cole walked through the rain, rain drumming on the sidewalk around him and in the street. He took a shortcut to his apartment and in the alley, he suddenly was surrounded by security guards. They wore UNATCO uniforms and held stun batons.

"What-" said Cole, and then a stun baton hit him in the face. He felt a bolt of lightning streak through his body, a liquid river of flowing wet agony only it was electrical and in his nervous system. He twitched like a limp ragdoll on the cement as the boots around him rained kicks and the rain rained water.

"You know too much Cole" said the leader "You're getting too close." And then they walked away. Cole pulled out his cellphone. "Megan…"he said "help me." And then he blacked out.

When he came to, he was lying on his couch naked with a towel over his face. He pulled it off and looked around. He was in his apartment, and Dr Reed was looking at a photo of Hermione. He felt bruised all over, like he had been hit in the face with a stun baton and then kicked repeatedly by a gang of rent-a-cops.

Dr Reed looked over. "She's very pretty, in a mousy sort of way."

Cole chuckled grimly. "Her name is Hermione. She's dead."

"Oh" said Reed "I'm sorry."

"Don't be." Said Cole. "She's in a better place now, up in heaven, away from all this."

Reed sat on the couch and Cole was suddenly anxiously aware of his nakedness. He placed the towel over his groin. Reed stood up and walked into the next room.. Cole stood up and got dressed again, then stumbled over to his desk and lifted the half-empty bottle of scotch to his lips.

Lit in the doorway, Reed stood crossing her arms. "Do you really need any more of that stuff tonight?" she asked, a dangerous edge in her voice. Cole sighed and put down the bottle. Then he sat at his desk and reviewed the evidence. What he had reconstructed after Moody's torching wasn't great, but the code Megan had provided him was a key clue. If Cole could slip in and ask a few questions, it looked like the net was closing in for Potter. He smiled under his lips and slid the case folder under his pillow, falling fast asleep.

In the morning it was raining darkly outside and the sky was an overcast slate grey, the kind that reminds you of winter, of death and of heavy rainfall. Cole looked around his apartment but Reed had left in the night with his bottle of scotch. Hypocrite, he thought. Then Cole pressed his tie, tied his shoes and headed for the door, grabbing his jacket on the way out.

At Hogwarts, Cole cheerfully told the door guard the code and strolled right in. He nearly collided with a shifty looking red-haired individual in the doorway. Sensing an opportunity, Cole stuck out his hand. "Hello, my name is Adahn." Said Cole "And I'm new here. I was wondering what you know about Harry Potter and the theft from UNATCO that led to the theft of the MGELLERN device."

Ron smiled. He liked new people. "Sure, I'm Ron. I'm Harry's best friend and I can tell you everything about it." Cole smiled, the tape recorder in his jacket taking in every word. "So Harry is my best friend. I've known him ever since he had his accident went the event horizon began when the black mesa incident occurred."

Cole interjected "And that happened here?"

"Yes" said Ron "And Harry nearly choked to death, and had to become augmented to survive. But that's in the past. Then Hagrid took him here to work and Harry was our best agent. Then Dumbledore came."

"Dumbledore?"

"Dumbledore."

"Dumbledore?"

"Dumbledore."

"Dumbledore?"

"Enough already. Dumbledore showed up with his new plans and his new ideas and he engineered this project where Dr. Reed and Dr. Kleiner would work together on a portal device…but then it went missing. That's because UNATCO stole it, so Harry got it back. Then it turned out Dumbledore was actually Diablo and the portal device led to hell."

Cole blinked. "Hell?"

Ron shrugged. "Technically you shouldn't know that, because it's high clearance. Forget everything about hell I mentioned."

Cole was so pleased with what Ron told him that he agreed on the spot and forgot all the details about hell and Diablo. "So Reed built the device.?"

"Reed and Kleiner, yeah." Ron replied, lighting a cigarette.

"Whatever." Said Cole. "Then UNATCO stole it?"

"Well, yes" said Ron, hesitantly "but it's complicated. We don't really have any proof it was ours to begin with. But Harry recovered it and then, well, you know…" he trailed off, like his cigarette with it's trail of smoke.

Cole grinned. He had everything he needed, almost. "Ron you stupid fool" said Cole "I am actually a detective! You have just proved Harry's guilt!" Then Cole lifted Ron by the collar and threw him through a plate glass window.

"I AM PLACING HARRY POTTER UNDER ARREST!" He screamed at the top of his voice.


	10. Chapter 10

Harry woke to the sound of screaming. He lazily sat up, pinned by one arm to the ground by the sleeping form of Hermione. Harry pulled his orange sweater on. Hellfire gleamed through the windows of the science facility. The warm light of the hellfire made Hermione's hair glow an almost auburn, lustrous color. They were in hell.

Hermione rolled over, crushing Harry's hand.

Harry stood up. The two had sheltered in a mysterious facility with giant pits of radioactive goop in it and no safety railings. Harry grunted. No OSHA compliance. Hermione woke up. Harry lit a cigarette and looked out the window. Through the smoked quartz glass, he could see the rocky brimstone plains rolling before him like a landscape of deceit and homelessness.

"Harry...?" asked Hermione.

"What?"

"I think I'm going to be sick."

Harry turned to her, horrified. He realized that he was immune to radiation because of his augments, but Hermione wasn't a cybrobot, so she would die. A single tear ran down Harry's cheek. An agonizing, slow death as her cells broke down under the pressure of the gamma rays. First her hair would fall out, then her teeth, then her eyes – it was sort of like hepatitis, except not as bad. The tear was oil, because he was an augmented person. Hermione stood up. Then she opened her purse, pulled out a medical kit and ate some anti-radiation pills.

"There, all better."

Harry sighed with relief.

Then Harry sat down again. He lit a cigarette. Hermione sat down and lit a cigarette too. The two of them smoked cigarettes. Then they finished smoking cigarettes. Suddenly there was a noise!

Harry sat bolt upright and reached under a pile of grubby laundry for his 34. Automatic. He aimed it at the door. Then the door opened/

There was a zombie who was behind the door, only the door opened, so it was standing in the doorway. It wore a green jumpsuit that said "MARS RESEARCH TEAM ALPHA BETA GAMELON" on it. Two shots rang out and two shells ejected from Harry's gun. Hot lead flew across the open space, sending ripples of force through the air. Two meaty thunk noises emanated from the shambling form of the zombie that menaced them, and the zombie, or whatever it was, died. Harry frowned.

"I did not know there were zombies in hell." he said.

Hermione shrugged.

Harry said "We'd better leave. It's dangerous here, there might be more zombies. There might be an entire horde of zombies outside."

He was right!

Harry and Hermione gazed in horror at the tableau before them. A veritable horde of shambling undead lurched and cavorted in front of the building they stood in, moaning and screaming and letting off small-arms fire. Harry began to unsheathe his subdermals, knowing that this fight was likely hopeless due to their sheer numbers, but suddenly there was bright light in hell, only it was bright holy light and not hellfire light. A giant beam of magic swooshy light energy destroyed the zombies, like a laser powered by Jesus. The screams of the undead became the screams of tortured souls released from their earthly (or helly) bonds. It was the spirit of Etienne Tristram who floated before them, driving the undead away. He was very nearly the pope once. He had a french cast about his transparent blue face, and wore a cardinal's large hat and the traditional cardinal's red trench coat.

Harry was so surprised he dropped his cigarette.

"Who are you?" Harry and Hermione asked in unison of the ghostly, radiant and parochial figure that floated before them.

"Ask me who I was." he said.

"Who were you?" Harry and Hermione asked in unison of the ghostly, radiant and parochial figure that floated before them. As an afterthought, Harry added "You're particular, for a floating radiant parochial figure." Hermione nodded in silent agreement. Harry loved her.

"In life I was nearly the Pope, Etienne Tristram."

The two stared in disbelief at the figure levitating before them. There was no noise. An awkwardly long pause ensued while everyone contemplated the situation.

"You don't believe in me." observed the GRPF.

Hermione blinked. "How do we know you really exist?"

"What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?" inquired the GRPF.

Hermione tilted her head to the side. "Is this a trick question?"

"Why do you doubt your senses?"

Harry lit a cigarette because the GRPF was so annoying. "Listen, assclown. Stop fucking around or I will ventilate you." he threatened.

"Try it, punk." said Etienne. Harry pulled for his 34. automagic, fiber-optic nerves moving at near lightspeed. A nanosecond passed. Harry's arm leapt downwards, air smashed out of the way with a popping sound. A nanosecond passed. Harry's palm settled over the butt of his automatic, settling over the wood grain texture. A nanosecond passed. Harry gripped the automatic, pulling it free and raising it to face the ghost. A nanosecond passed. Etienne moved like lightening, pulling an arbalest from his pocket. He shot Harry's gun right out of his hand.

"Ow" said Harry. Harry stared in disbelief. "You draw so fast!" Etienne only smiled wisely. "In life I studied under the famous Rousseau." Harry was amazed.

"Can you teach me to do that?" he asked.

"Nope. I'm here to offer you teaching of a different kind - Spiritual!" said Tristram, smiling wisely. Harry frowned. Harry hated religion because it was all lies and there wasn't a shred of truth to them. Harry was a student of the philosophies of Friedrice Neizcehizesche, and held no truck with organized religion and spirituality. It was the opiate of the masses, in his opinion, a tool used by the corrupt and the depraved to control the weak minded.

"I don't need spiritual education" insisted Harry.

"Spiritual guidance, then?" Etienne said, smiling wisely.

"Okay." said Harry doubtfully. For now, he would humor this strange ghost. Hermione wandered off.

"So here is the first lesson." said Etienne. "Who was the first president of the united states?" Harry searched his mind quickly, but found nothing. "I don't know, I'm British."

He never saw the slap coming.

Harry wiped the thin line of blood from his chin and stared at the radiant parochial ghostly figure indignantly. Etienne Tristram smiled wisely. "You have a lot to learn." he said, and then Harry lit a cigarette. Etienne Tristram snatched it from Harry's mouth and put it out in his eye. Harry screamed in agony, a red aura of pain totally obscuring his vision.

"Harry, if I am to provide you with spiritual guidance, you must quit smoking." Etienne said, smiling wisely and kicking Harry in the stomach. Harry vomited, curled into the fetal position and passed out before he hit the ground.


	11. Chapter 11

As Harry hopped around on one foot on the balance beam, Etienne began to speak.

"Harry, we cannot remain in this old science lab forever."

"Have you forgotten that it's hell out there?" Harry asked, switching from one foot to the other as if he were river dancing. Piranhas nipped at his toes, but Harry deftly avoided them.

"We must leave this place, Harry. We must go...to Tristram!"

Harry blinked. "You're already here."

"No, I mean the VILLAGE Tristram."

Harry regarded him awkwardly and then asked "Why?" Tristram smiled wisely and said "To stop Diablo." Harry said "Why should I stop Diablo?" And Tristram smiled wisely and said "You must do it to save the world, Harry. Because you are the chosen one."

Harry stared at Etienne balefully. "I never asked for this."

That evening Hermione found a crate full of cakes and Etienne, Harry and her sat around in a courtyard eating the cakes. Harry lit a cigarette and looked up. The sky was a murky black-red with no clouds twenty four hours a day. There was no wind, no cool breezes to soothe wounded hearts, no soft rains. Harry ached for the comfort of the Earth he knew and loved, and yet – here, with Hermione, he could be happy.

In the morning the three set out across the obsidian hellscape, rain beating down around them and hissing into steam as it hit the radioactive lava. Etienne's metier was soaked. Harry rode a motorcycle he found in the facility and Hermione walked. The motorcycle was broken down and useless, like everything in hell but Harry had repaired it with augments. It belched a foul cloud of black smoke that mingled with the rain as he pedaled his way along the obsidian hellscape.

Suddenly, there was a noise. Ahead of them, the ground rumbled and split open, shards of jet, splinters of obsidian flying, as demons jumped out at them. Harry hit one with his motorcycle, and the horned demon twice as tall as a man with bronze hide crumpled with the force of the iron hog colliding with it. Demonic viscera sprayed in every direction. Harry couldn't stop the motorcycle in time, and there was a loud scrunch as the metal was flattened and the demonic viscera went flying. Harry flew off and landed in a conveniently placed haystack. And he cried. Life was so unfair.

Etienne punched out the demons and they died.

"Diablo is trying to stop us, Harry. He doesn't want us to get to Tristram. If we get to Tristram, we can seal the hell portal up and stop Diablo's plan of world conquest!" Harry smiled with hope at Etiennes statement.

Harry got back on his motorcycle and they drove away, rain pouring down in sheets now like a waterfall occupying everywhere at once, so really more like torrents. But it wasn't biblical because it didn't flood the world. The basalt plains of hellish rock hissed as steam rose from the lava vents.

They stopped at a hotel, and set off in the morning towards Tristram after a light continental breakfast, getting ever closer to their final goal. Whatever awaited them at the village of Tristram, Harry was ready.

Etienne wiped Harry's nose with a Kleenex. Harry had picked up a flu somewhere along the road through the blistering obsidian hellscape and they had stopped at an abandoned gas station. The structure was dilapidated, with a puddle of gasoline pooling outside and a dilapidated sign with dilapidated letters spelling out "OBSIDIAN HELLSCAPE PUMP AND DUMP" on it.

Hermione ripped the sleeve off her hoodie to make bandages for Harry. They had jury rigged a bed from a pile of national geographic and inquirers. They had laid out a sheet of fiberglass on top to make it more comfortable. Harry rolled around in it exultantly, phlegm flying from every orifice.

Hermione ripped the metier off Etienne's head to make a pillow when stuffed with inedible preserved foodstuffs taken from the now-dead freezer in the back. As Harry laid his head on the improvised pillow, a stream of twinkie filling squirted out the end.

"Oh Hermione" said Harry "I feel like I am going to die." Hermione pressed a damp hoodie sleeve rag on his head until he passed out. Then she wiped his nose again.

Harry sat up "I need to stop DIABLO!" he yelled, but then he collapsed again. "Harry" said Etienne as he smiled wisely "You need to conserve your strength. And he tenderly stroked Harry's forelock."

They fed Harry fruit juice past the best before date and he spat it out. "It's okay, Harry" said Hermione. "You're augmented so you can't get food poisoning."

"I AM NOT AUGUMENTED!" Harry screamed, and he threw his head back down on the metier, a stream of snot and tears shining in the air, the cigarette went flying. There was a gooshy noise and Etienne ducked to avoid the stream of delicious cream filling and cockroaches.

"Oh look, silly girl. You upset him." Tristram said, shoving Hermione aside and dabbing at Harry's eyes. "There, there" he said, smiling wisely. Harry started to feel better, but then he felt sad again.

They watched _Flight of the Concords _on a television set Harry found and repaired with his augments. Harry lit a cigarette and then the three sat down to watch. Harry cried when Mel won the race because he was so emotional, and when the movie ended he fell fast asleep.

The next morning Harry was surly and complained to Etienne. "I haven't had a cigarette for weeks, I'm feeling terrible. I am in withdrawal." Etienne just smiled wisely, but Harry continued. "I just want to withdraw from the world."

Etienne looked down at him. "Loser." he said.

"What?" asked Harry, surprised.

"LOSER! LOSER! YOU'RE A LOSER! YOU ARE NOTHING! YOU ARE DIRT!" screamed Etienne. Harry smiled and said "I think I understand." And then he got better.

Early in the morning, Harry felt something in his shoulderblades shift. Then something went "SPROING" and Harry shot up wide awake. He didn't see anything because his shirt was ripped and covering his face. Harry took his shirt off (You could see his muscular, plastic chest piece. It was slightly incongruous looking because it didn't quite match his natural skin tone).

Sticking out of his back were a set of enormous, polyresin chromium steel wings with little helicopter thingies and jets and metal feathers. They were painted black, like the rest of Harry's augments. They were perhaps twelve feet wide apiece, weighing in at around forty pounds each, and had little electrical cables strung around them. On the tip of his right wing there was a note.

Harry snatched it. It was from Dr. Reed. It said:

"Harry,

When you were nearly drowned at the Black Mesa Incident, I decided to put these wings in you during surgery in case one day you might need them. I didn't tell you because you might be upset about it but I know it was the right decision. I love you,

Megan"

Harry burst into tears and lit himself a cigarette. Wiping his eyes on the letter, the ink smudged and ran down his face like tears, only black like ink. He remembered a long time ago, Megan and Him went on a date and bought hotdogs and sat down on a picnic bench. They watched Geese flying north for the winter and Megan told Harry that she had always secretly wanted to have giant mechanical wings with jets in them. Harry had laughed at the time, but now...now he would never see her again. She would have wanted this, not him...never him. Harry ate the note to destroy it, making the writing part of himself forever.

Hermione and Etienne woke up. Hermione sat up and looked at Harry, and her face lit up like it was Christmas. "Harry" She said "You have wings!"

Harry only grunted.

"This is so cool! I've always wanted giant metal wings with helicopter blades and jets!" she said, and then she saw he was crying. "Oh Harry, it's not a bad thing! Being augmented is good!"

"I AM NOT AUGUMENTED!" Harry screamed and he tried to shield himself from view with his wings, accidentally snapping himself in the face. His tears sparkled in the hellfire. Harry didn't care that Hermione thought his wings were spiffy, Harry hated being augmented. Because Harry was augmented he would never see his family again.

Etienne weighed his opinion in. "Harry, think how proud your parents would be to know that you now have a twenty-four foot wingspan!"

"MY PARENTS ARE DEAAAAAAAAAAD!" Harry screamed at the sky, sinking to his knees. Thunder rolled across the plains. Harry wept. Etienne only smiled wisely. "Harry, your parents will never be truly dead while you are here."

Harry smiled. "You think so?" he asked.

"No." said Etienne.

Harry ran away as fast as he could. He ran through the obsidian hellscape, tears steaming out behind him, barely doing four miles an hour because of his bulky eighty pound wings. Harry half-ran, half waddled like a goose until he came to a cliff. Harry just wanted it to end. So he jumped off the cliff, chuffing for breath like a locomotive powered by prayer.

Part way down, Harry realized this was probably a bad idea.

Screaming incoherently, wishing he was somewhere else, he flailed desperately in a downward spiral, ground looming closer and closer and closer and suddenly he was soaring on an updraft that smelled of sulfur and ash. Soaring, like a goose.

Harry felt free for once in his life, felt whole soaring, soaring over the obsidian hellscape. He was in hell, yes. He was involved in massive corporate conspiracies, yes. He was travailing with an abusive spirit guide and a doormat, yes. He wasn't even a human being anymore, yes. Hagrid was dead, yes. Reed was kidnapped, yes. Dumbledore was actually Diablo, yes. His head still hurt when he was shaken by the hair back in the streets of Detroit, yes. He had just recently recovered from a ghastly flu, yes. He had recently crawled through a sewer, yes, and come to think of it that's probably where he picked the flu up. He had been thrown through a porcelain sink and several bathroom stalls by a cybernetic bear, yes. But it felt like he was in Heaven.

Eventually Harry got bored and decided to return to Etienne and Hermione. So he turned back towards where he remembered them being in a wide loop, until eventually the telescopes in his eyeballs spotted the two of them. He settled in for a landing.

Etienne and Hermione watched as Harry smashed into the ground at ninety miles an hour, ruining their game of go-fish utterly as he dug a forty foot long furrow in the obsidian hellscape, sending the cards flying.

The two walked over to Harry and helped him up. Etienne smiled wisely and said "Someday, Harry, this power will save you in your darkest hour of need." Harry only frowned. "I never ask-"

He never saw the slap coming but he certainly felt it.

"Harry, because you have faith, you are strong. We do not choose the paths we are given. We must simply follow our destinies." Harry responded with a quote from friedrice Neizsheneishe "All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses."

Etienne laughed and the three of them walked into the sunset...towards Tristram.


	12. Chapter 12

The village of Tristram, overlooked by a massive stone cathedral, stood before them. It was raining. The obsidian hellscape flickered with flames and steam, and smoke, and flames. The three stood on a hill looking down at the abandoned village.

"Here," said Etienne "We must make a tragic decision."

The three walked down a muddy path into the center of the village, where an enormous portal was open. The portal was blue. "How did this place come to be here?" asked Harry.

Etienne gazed around the little village. "Diablo...this is not the first time he has schemed to conquer the earth. Once, long ago, he came to France – in a bid for power, he tore a hole between worlds, and entered into Tristram. I stopped him. Barely. But I had to sacrifice everything, Harry. This is where I was born. I was named for this village. And to stop Diablo, I had to let it die."

There was a moment of silence. Harry gazed, wordlessly, at Etienne. He thought, for a moment, that a ghostly tear ran down the cheek of Etienne.

"The time must come for the most important decision, Harry." said Etienne. "You see, I never told you this, but to close the portal one of us must stay behind. You must make...the ultimate sacrifice."

"I'll do it." said Harry, without thinking. "I must, because, well, I'm dying slowly, Etienne. The augments are killing me."

"But Harry, the world needs you. You must stop the Diablo."

"I can't!" Harry wailed.

"You can!" said Hermione.

"You must do it, Harry, you are the chosen one." said Etienne, smiling wisely. "Hermione can stay."

Hermione blanched. "What? No, I-"

But it was too late. Etienne grabbed Harry by his long red hair and flung himself and Harry through the portal, cackling like a deranged madman.

Harry crashed onto the pavement in the courtyard of Hogwarts, a tear in reality itself sealing behind him. He rolled with the velocity, bits of metal coming off him, but he quickly rose into a standing position. Ron was there wearing a long dark trench coat, staring at Harry in bemused disbelief. It was raining and rain was running down the side of the building and forming puddles. Ron lit a cigarette.

"Harry," he said "You're back."

Harry stood up and dusted himself off.

"Also you have wings now." Ron observed curiously. Harry pretended not to hear. "Ron," he said "I've just been to hell and met the spirit of Etienne Tristram, and Hermione was there too-"

Ron cut him off "There's no time for that now, Harry. Detective Phelps is here to arrest you."

Harry blinked. "Who?" And a moment later, he felt a blackjack swing down on the back of his soft, augmented head and everything went even blacker than it already was, which was pretty impressive given that it was both night, and raining out, overcast and devoid of light pollution since the city could no longer afford to keep the streetlights powered, and, well, you get the idea.

Harry Potter sat in the holding cell in the jail cell. He lay on the lumpy, uncomfortable jail bed.

There was a retched smell of bowel movements and soiled linens emanating from a shadowy corner of Harry's cell that contained the remains of his cellmate, Fred Wesley, who had committed suicide last month. Harry had taken up a complaint with the staff and was assured they would respond promptly to the issue. They didn't. Aggravated by this, Harry sighed, happy that his augments prevented him from smelling the grisly remains.

It was raining and Harry's black trenchcoat was dripping wet from the rain, slowly forming a puddle under him.

Suddenly, there was a knock at the cell door. Harry looked up to see a man in a blue suit with spiky hair that looked like it had been blown back in a windstorm and his preteen psychic girl assistant. The man sat on one side of the plate glass simplex-glass window and his preteen psychic girl assistant sat on the other. Harry knew who it was at once because psychic preteen girl sidekicks were so rare in Vegas. Harry loved her.

It was raining and the spiky haired man's trenchcoat was dripping wet from the rain, slowly forming a puddle under him.

"Hello, Mister Potter, my name is Mister Wright, but you can call me Phoenix." The man told him.

"I know who you are." Harry said.

"I'm here to defend you. But in order to do that, Harry, I must know, are you innocent?" He asked.

Harry gasped, mammaries rushing back to him in a maddening torrent, like the suppressed, traumatic memories of a reclusive, traumatized patient, the repression being the only thing keeping them from going into a psychotic killing spree, in a mental hospital, that had been reopened by a careless therapist during a hypnotherapy session in which the therapist would feel the full wrath of the patients vengeance. Hermione. Hermione who had sacrificed everything for the sake of Harry's humanity. Hermione who was in hell. Harry loved her.

Harry shook his head, clearing away the phantoms of the past. "I am, but prisoners aren't given state-appointed attorneys since the combine took over, who sent you?" Harry asked, suspiciously.

The spiky haired man smiled at this remark, "You're very clever," He replied, "a friend of yours hired me to defend you on his behalf, Ginny Wesley."

Harry gasped, mammaries rushing back to him in a maddening torrent, like the suppressed, traumatic memories of a reclusive, traumatized patient, the repression being the only thing keeping them from going into a psychotic killing spree, in a mental hospital, that had been reopened by a careless therapist during a hypnotherapy session which in which the therapist would feel the full wrath of the patients vengeance. Ginny. Ginny, who had made him passion's plaything with the scorching radiance of her incredibly powerful emotional love affair. Ginny, with her sparkling, laughing eyes. Harry loved her.

"Now that we have that out of the way, What do you make of this?" Phoenix said, proffering his attorney's badge to Harry. Harry shook his head. "It's just a little bit of metal, Mr. Wright." Harry sighed. "If I had any faith in the court system, it died a long time ago."

Wright only sighed in response, knowing full well how long it would take to prove his innocence.

"Well, Harry, I'll do what I can for you, but I'm not sure how it's going to go. I don't have much to defend you with."

At this point, Wright's companion piped up. "Don't worry, Wright. I can sense his innocence with my psychic powers."

Wright gave her a skeptical look. "You can?"

She gave him a thumbs up. "Yeah!"

Wright shrugged. "If you say so, Maya."

She nodded emphatically. "You'll just have to keep the prosecution on their toes and on the defensive the first day, until we have some more time to indict one of the witnesses."

Wright gave his friend a quizzical look. "You mean...one of the witnesses did it? You can tell with your psychic powers?"

"Wright," she explained with a kindly yet condescending tone, "It doesn't matter if the witness actually did it or not. We're just getting our client" and here she gestured at Harry, who was staring at the two of them with disbelief "off, regardless of his innocence."

"But I only help the truly innocent!" Wright declared.

The woman laughed in his face, purple kimono shaking up and down with the force of her laugh. They excused themselves and left arguing. Harry smiled to himself, knowing he was in good hands as the visitation cell filled with knockout gas. Little did he know, this wouldn't be his only visitor.

Tonight, he would dream.

Harry tossed and turned on his grubby, lumpy, cot. Not because it was uncomfortable, but because he was dreaming.

It had been years since his last dream. In his mind of minds he could see the nightmares he had had in the past, about cold metal running in rivulets down his wrists, up his arms, smothering his face with the glossy, glass-like reflections cast on the metal as it poured down his throat. Harry did not like to dream.

Harry always wondered when he would next dream. It was a battle each night, falling asleep with the anticipation of yet another horrible nightmare only to wake up without dreaming at all.

This had all began after he had been approached by Hagrid, ever since he had been untimely snatched away from his family. Years had passed and he couldn't dream. Years had passed and he hadn't heard from his family, from Vernon, Penny, or Sylas. Harry reminded himself to write to them.

Anyway, he was dreaming. Pictures flew through his mind's eye as fast as someone with a mixture of Tourette's and ADHD having a seizure while operating the machine for a slide show. Too many scenes to count. Too many deaths that he had witnessed and/or caused. He dreamed of when Hagrid died in his arms. He dreamed of when Dr. Reed was kidnapped during the raid on Hogwarts, and how he was powerless to stop them.

Harry awoke at this, jerked up at the sight of Dr. Reed being dragged onto the boat, screaming for help and remembering being helpless to save her. His face felt moist and his pillow was wet. Harry realized he was crying. Tears were streaming down his face like the raindrops falling in torrents outside the window.

It was raining outside, Harry noticed.

Suddenly, there was a blinding flash of light that looked like lightning followed by a deafeningly loud crash that sounded like thunder.

A contrastingly quiet voice compared to the previous boom of thunder appeared out of the shadows.

"Hello, Harry."

Harry sat bolt upright and reached under a pile of grubby laundry for his 34. Automatic, only it wasn't there because Cole had taken it away when he arrested Harry. He turned to see it was Ginny's ghost!

Harry gasped, the memories rushing back to him in a maddening torrent, like the suppressed, traumatic memories of a reclusive, traumatized patient, in a mental hospital that had been reopened by a careless therapist during a hypnotherapy session which in which the therapist would feel the full wrath of the patients vengeance. Ginny. Ginny, who had made him passion's plaything with the scorching radiance of her incredibly powerful emotional love affair. Ginny, with her long, sparkling, ash blond hair and rough, pebbled, ebony skin that rippled like rainbows in the gasoline lamplight. Harry loved her.

Only it might have been Hagrids ghost. It was hard to tell, because the cell was dim. Harry lit a cigarette.

"Harry, you must never forget why you fight, why you're here. It was so long ago that we met, when you killed my family and we ran away together." Ginny said. Harry began to cry again as he remembered the event, how romantic it was, he reminisced.

"There is no time, you must stop Dumbledore before his evil plans succeed!" Gunny continued. "You must stop him and then travel to the ruins of the Black Mesa building and reverse the Event Horizen. It's your destiny, and you can't fight destiny." Hagrid told him.

The ghost then slowly faded into nothingness, leaving Harry by himself.

And then Harry was alone again, like he always was, like he knew he always would be.

Harry soon drifted back into an uneasy sleep.

Alone.

Like he always knew he would be.

Like he always was.

Alone.

Like he always knew he would be.

Alone.


	13. Chapter 13

Cole Phelps sighed as he heard the voice of Doctor Reed on the phone.

"Who is this?" Doctor Reed continued.

Cole Phelps sighed as he heard the voice of Dr. Reed on the phone.

"Are you busy tonight?" Cole Phelps said seductively into the mouthpiece of the phone.

"Yes." Doctor Reed replied before hanging up.

Cole Phelps sighed and redialed the number.

"Hello?" Doctor Reed said over the phone.

"What are you doing that's so important that you can't come talk to me?" Cole asked, seductively.

There was a knock at the door. Cole answered it, hoping it was pizza, only to see Dr. Reed hanging up her cellphone. And there she was. The woman who meant everything to him. The woman who meant so little to him. Did he love her? Or did he hate her? Cole couldn't make up his mind. Cole was totally undecided. Cole wished he was more consistently written, but this was impossible for reasons I'm not going to get into, okay?

It was raining outside of Cole's apartment and Doctor Reed's genuine leather fur coat clung to her body in voluptuous damp curves that outlined her form. She was dripping wet from the rain. She was soaked from the rain.

Cole offered to remove her coat from her. Doctor Reed refused. Instead, she took it off herself and dropped it on the floor in front of him, making a loud 'splatch' that caused Phelps to wince in pain at the destruction of his new carpet upholstery that covered the entirety of the floor of his apartment.

Outside it was raining.

Cole's jaw dropped as he regarded Doctor Reeds scantily clad form. She was wearing a diaphanous robe made of gauzy silk. It was damp, too, from the rain, and also clung to her so Cole could see her minute nipples, outlined by equally small aureoles. He admired her ribs, the curve of her collarbone, the definition of her shoulder.

Doctor Reed reached for him, caressing his face with one hand and his groin with the other.

Cole took her in his arms and gently lowered her to the floor, burying his face in her neck. She let out a little gasp and tightened her grip.

…

Later that night they sat on the couch and the two smoked post-coital cigarettes.

"So how about the weather?"

"I hear its going to rain."

It was raining outside and the two were dripping wet from the soaking wet rain. Cole reflected that perhaps he ought to close the window, which he had foolishly left open a crack, but decided that it probably was too much effort, and besides, it would be hard to force it closed because the water was streaming in with incredible force. Cole stroked Dr. Reed's head gently and turned to watch as Reed smoked a cigarette in his arms.

Cole knew. He loved her.

Phoenix Wright awoke with a jerk. Somehow he had passed out before returning to his apartment. His head was throbbing in pain as if a child who had stolen a sledgehammer was using his head as a personal smash-ground. Wright realized that he shouldn't have stayed at the pub so late.

He checked his alarm clock and noticed it was only 6:30am. I slept in again, he thought, rubbing his temples wildly to dull the pain. He opened his mouth and threw in several assorted pills and alcoholic beverages to get rid of his hangover-ache.

Phoenix got up and put on his bowler tie and suit before walking out of his apartment. He had to prove Harry's innocence, he knew that much. But how was he going to do it? Suddenly Phoenix remembered his conversation from the night before. The world around him went dark as his flashback began:

Everything was in sepia tone, as is appropriate for a flashback.

Hagrid was sitting at a table in the back of the pub, waiting pensively as Phoenix Wright approached.

"I got your message, what do you need to tell me?" Phoenix Wright asked as he sat down. The rain outside was falling in torrents and Phoenix was still dripping wet from the rain as he lit a cigarette.

Hagrid did not divert his gaze from outside the window, "Wright, you need to know."

"Know what?" Phoenix asked, getting a tad impatient.

"About Harry, about the court case." Hagrid began, "There's no easy way to tell you this."

"Tell me what?"

"Do you think Harry is innocent?" Hagrid asked, finally turning to look at Phoenix.

"I… Well…" Phoenix said, caught off guard by the question, "Yes. He has to be. I mean, I believe he has to be. Harry Potter The Boy Who Lived would never do such a thing. And I don't defend the guilty, right?"

Hagrid smiled at this, "Good. I knew you would believe."

"Is that it? Is that all you wanted from me?" Phoenix asked, getting a tad impatient.

"No, there's more." Hagrid bellowed, "Phoenix, you were meant to defend Harry in this courtroom, you need to find a way to call Phelp's case into question."

"But how? What can I do? Phelp's case against Harry is as solid as the brick wall to Diagon Alley!" Phoenix protested.

Hagrid sighed and took several strides from his cigarette, "Be at this address at this time." Hagrid said, handing Phoenix a note of paper, "You cannot fail, Phoenix. More forces than you know are involved in this conspiracy." Hagrid finally said.

Phoenix was confused, but knew what he had to do and knew his role, "Okay. I will do it."

Hagrid smiled again, the giant cyborg's shining golden teeth glimmering in the light of the pub. "Good, I knew I could count on you."

Phoenix knew he was forgetting something, and looked through his inventory in an attempt to remember what it was. A moment later, he sighed with relief. I'm losing my touch, Phoenix thought. Maybe I should lay off the booze.

Phoenix took his attorney's badge out of his pocket and presented it to Hagrid.

"Don't worry, Hagrid. I'm an attorney. I will get your friend off. I have never lost a case."

Hagrid nodded with satisfaction.

Phoenix Wright stood up and began to walk away.

"Remember, Phoenix, this is your destiny, and you can't fight destiny." Hagrid yelled to Phoenix.

Phoenix turned around with a confused look, but Hagrid was already gone.

The scene disappeared around him as the flashback was over. Phoenix Wright fished around in his pocket and retrieved a folded up note of paper. He opened up and read.

'Lewis Apartments, 54 Backerson St. 12 o'clock noon sharp, wait in the bushed across the street, bring a camera, don't be late'

Phoenix Wright hoped the note would have clarified things, but instead just added more questions. However, Phoenix had learned years ago to trust Hagrid, and so he would do as the note told.

"It's destiny, Phoenix, and you can't fight destiny." Hagrid's voice boomed in his head.

Phoenix did a full 180 degree turn and headed back to his apartment for a camera.


	14. Chapter 14

Phoenix knelt in the bushes outside of Phelps window, clutching his camera to his breasts as midnight slowly made its way into the future. He could hear the couple inside, Dr. Reed and Cole Phelps, as they made insinuating small talk. He sat in the bushes, dripping wet from the rain which poured down from the sky like it was very overcast and rainy. He clutched his camera to his breast and waited outside of the window overlooking the bed in Cole's room in Cole's apartment in Coke's apartment building on the block in the city where Cole Phelps lived on the fifteenth floor.

It would be blackmail, Phoenix knew, but he trusted Hagrid and knew that it was innocent until proven innocent in this corrupt society. He wanted justice, so he had to subvert the justice system by any means possible. Sometimes, to get justice, one had to sow injustice. If this meant blackmailing the detective, so be it. He watched, as Cole threw Dr. Reed into his bedroom like a sack of wet hamburger, and kicked her onto the bed, where he made love to her like she was a wet sack of hamburger and he was a dog, which was messy, and gross, and ugly, and sloppy, and full of love. Reed was equally enthusiastic about the whole thing. Phoenix almost threw up in his mouth he was so aroused-disgusted. He was conflicted about his feelings about Cole and just couldn't stand the way he treated her. He snapped a photo. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And a couple more. And a few more for good measure, and another two, and another, and your mother, and another, and another, and another, and two more.

Cole and Dr. Reed blinked, half-blinded as they were assailed by a torrent of camera flashes that pelted them like raindrops on the window. Cole Phelps lit a cigarette, the window still shaking from the force of their lovemaking. Phoenix flipped the pair the bird, threw a rock through the window, and jumped out of the tree he was sitting in and pedaled away on Cole's bicycle.

Cole walked over to the broken glass and picked up the rock. There was a note attached from Phoenix. It said "COLE DO NOT TESTIFY AGAINST HARRY OR THEY WILL KNOW"

Cole crumpled the note in his hands and dropped it onto the floor in a fit of animal rage. He screamed like an animal.

Dr. Reed came to his side "What will you do, Cole?" she asked, worried.

"I must testify. It will ruin my reputation but I must or Harry will walk free. Another murderer loose on the streets. I couldn't live with myself."

"What about my reputation?" asked Reed.

But Cole had to make this sacrifice.


	15. Chapter 15

Harry sat on the edge of a plastic bench that stank of urine, and watched the maggots writhe in his soup. He carefully picked one out with his mechanical fold-in tweezers and inspected it with a look of disgust.

"Hey, you gonna eat that?" asked an elderly man across the canteen table from him. Harry frowned. The old man plucked the maggot from Harry's mechanical grasp and fed it to a bald, hatchling bird in his shirt breast pocket. Harry stared in admiration at the man who would risk everything for birds. Harry felt a deep connection with birds ever since he found out he had wings, the most wonderful day of his life as he recalled. Now he was in prison. Harry recalled the story of the old prisoner, who would leave part of his food at his high up window, so that birds would come and shit on him. Harry wasn't sure what the point of that story was, and assumed he was remembering it wrong.

"My name's Harry Potter the boy who lived." said Harry as a way of introducing himself. "I'm an old man in prison" said the old man in prison. "And my name is Red." said a reassuring, calm and measured deep voice. Harry looked over and saw a man played by Morgan Freeman sitting next to him. "Your name…I never asked for this."

Morgan Freeman began to narrate. "Well, I didn't think much of him to start. He seemed like a quiet kinda fellow, and standoffish too. But I learned to respect his quiet ways, started to wonder about his mysterious scar and those augments–" "I'm not augmented" Harry interjected "-and one day I asked him what he did to get thrown in here." Morgan Freeman paused significantly. Harry felt it would be rude to interrupt. "Days passed, and turned into months, and eventually, after the fifteenth 'I never asked for this' he told me about Hell, Dumbledore, Hermione and the OPRAH. At first I didn't believe him. But then, gradually, I came around to see his point of view."

Harry looked around. The scene had shifted. They were still in the cantine but the shadows had changed, the people were different. It was as if his monologue had warped reality itself. Harry shook his head in disbelief and rebooted his vision. Once he was sure what he was seeing was real, he said "Morgan, Er..Red, did you just…?"

Morgan Freeman merely nodded wisely. Suddenly a random inmate walked up. He was corpulent. His rough, waist length beard was tied in a double braid. "HANZER!" He screamed at Harry. "I AM NOT AUGMENTED!" Harry moaned and then opened his arm cannon and shot a laser beam from his augments at the man, tearing the muscle and bruising the fat. His left lower arm sailed off in an arc. The man vomits.

Suddenly Harry was surrounded by the police and hustled off to solitary confinement.

Harry got out of solitary two weeks later and joined Morgan Freeman at the table.

"Hello, Harry." said Morgan, sizing up Harry. "Was it worth it?"

"Easiest time I ever did." replied Harry.

"Bullshit. Time in the hole is never easy." said Morgan.

"But that's the beauty of augments." said Harry. "I have that, in here." And he pointed to himself. Everyone at the canteen looked at him like he was crazy. Morgan Freeman sighed. "What are you talking about, Harry? Spit it out."

"That there are places in the world that aren't made of stone! That there's something inside deep down they just can't take away from you. That's yours." "What are you talking about?" asked Morgan.

"Hope." Said Harry. "Hope." repeated Morgan. A steely look entered his eye. "Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane in here. It's got no use on the inside. You'd better get used to that idea." "Like the old man with the bird who committed suicide earlier in the story did?" asked Harry. "Fuck you." retorted Morgan Freeman, and he started to go to another table.

Harry looked over from the bench and saw a group of rough looking fellows walking out into a hallway. They looked like unsavory characters, so Harry asked Morgan Freeman who they were. "Harry, you don't go sniffing around the Sisters. They're bad. Rape bad." Harry stared blankly, then asked "Would it help if I told them I wasn't homosexual?" "You have to be human to be homosexual." Said Morgan Freeman. "I HATE YOU I'M NOT AUGMENTED!" screamed Harry. Morgan Freeman slapped him and said "I meant them, dumb ass."

-this scene cut for the HD re-release as previous installment was taking down for inappropriate content-

Some time later, after a hideous rape encounter with the local rapist prison gang, Harry was sitting in the prison yard enjoying a basketball and dribbling a milkshake when a group of scary prisoners in jerseys who were all bald and wearing Nikes surrounded him. He was expecting rape but was pleasantly surprised when they asked him to play baseball instead. Harry said "YES COME ON AND SLAM, IF YOU WANT TO HAM" quoting his favorite piece of Russian literature, SPACE JAM. They assembled at the diamond, and got out their wickets for the game. Harry switched on his targeting matrix and shot the leader in the chest with a gun so he would be out of the game and Harry would not have to focus on him during the game because he was shot with his gun by his targeting matrix. Both teams lit cigarettes as a form of salute and then play began. The prison guards were on Harry's team and the prisoners were on the other team.

Harry got 17 strikes and 1 spare in the first inning and in the second quarter his team had scored an addition 19 baskets and 8 home runs. The opposing team enjoyed a 97 point lead by half-time with the score being 97-0. The referee blew his whistle and called an offside for the linesmen.

The half-time was stellar quality and the dancers danced like they never danced before. There was a parade and a buffet was presented for all. Everyone smoked cigarettes and threw their hats in the air. like they just didn't care. The Warden and even Hagrid showed up for the games was so intense. The rain poured down in torrents and everyones' trenchcoats were dripping wet from the rain, a rainbow assortment of great war era bodywear that would make Joseph's coat of many colors turn rouge with envy.

After the second intermission, the round robin began. Harry scored 3 goals and only got 2 misconducts for beating other players into a pulp. Harry played for keeps.

There were only 1 minute left in the final game period and the opposing team enjoyed a 97 point lead with the score being 97-0. It would take a true miracle or act of god to have Harry's team win. Harry didn't believe in god because of the atrocities he had committed/witnessed. Harry Potter prepared his augments at the faceoff and as the referee dropped the puck, and harry won the faceoff by grabbing the basketball and kicking the other player in the face with it. Harry then activated his jet propulsion system and flew into orbit with the ball, turned around so he was not facing the opposing teams net and then threw the ball over his shoulder and it calmly and cleanly landed in the net.

Harry's goal was so spectacular he got 96 points for that goal. The score was now 97-96. The game was almost over with only one more hole to go, par 4. Harry saw a prison guard get smashed in the face with a hockey stick and, as all of his teeth flew out of his skull, used the distraction to score the winning hole in one. He grabbed the puck and jumped back into orbit, as an orchestral choir began to scream in ecstatic agony. Harry felt the flames of hell at his back, licking curiously at him like a puppy. The G-force was intense and Harry felt his body begin to twist and bend under the intense pressure, and just as he was about to shear from the shear force, he spun back towards the earth. As the void of space screamed past him, Harry let out a roar. "YIPPIE-KAY-YAAAAAAAY! MOTHER FUCKEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!" Shock waves traveled the circumference of the the earth as Harry penetrated the atmosphere with the ball. Moments later he hit the court with the force of an explosion so powerful that the state he was imprisoned within was destroyed utterly, chunks of the earth's crust propelled upward as a holocaust of ash and destruction swept through the world. The score marker ticked up by two points as Harry concluded his chaos dunk.

The team cheered, the onlookers were astonished, and the opposing team was bewildered by their loss. A group of prison guards on Harry's team lifted him up over his shoulder and paraded him around the campfire they had lit just for him. After the festivities were over, Harry and Morgan Freeman were tasked with cleaning up the mess they had made. It took several weeks, but was well worth it.

"Where did you learn to play such a good game?" asked Morgan freeman.

"I played college football for the reds back in '97" Harry remarked, reminiscing of the old days.

"Well, that was sure inspiring." Morgan Freeman said " I guess I can leave you to clean up this mess." And then he walked away.

Harry was still enthralled by his victory, he took the b-ball and threw in over his shoulder, expecting to hear the satisfying sound of it going into the net. However that was not what he heard.

"Ow! Hey! What the herr was that!?" An annoyed looking male said. He and his gang of other friends looking males all came over to the court and surrounded Harry.

The leader dropped his pants. Harry stared in stupefaction at the man's twelve foot cock. He gazed in horror as it levitated, seemingly of it's own power, and Harry realized, in horror, that the penis was a prehensile tentacle with a barbed tip.

The asian man smiled and shed his skin, revealing a thousand more tentacles in a radial pattern around a central eyestalk and drooling mouth, which dozens of prehensile tongues shot out of. With barbed tips and smaller prehensile tongues branching off of them.

Later that day, when Harry was recounting this horror to the warden, he was disappointed to find out they did not believe the story about the writhing tentacle mass that had assaulted him and did not investigate further.

Harry avoided that prisoner for the rest of the month.

Harry was bent over the table, his pants down around his ankles. Morgan Freeman was steady behind him preparing the ink and drawing out the outline of the tattoo.

"Are you sure you want to do this, Harry?" Morgan asked, knowing how much his ass had gone through since he arrived here in prison.

Harry only nodded in response.

Morgan Freeman lowered the tattoo pen onto Harry's ass.

The howls of pain could be heard thoroughly throughout the prison. The prisoners learned to ignore it; They knew how the warden liked to torture prisoners that were bad and broke the rules and assumed this was just another case of that.

It took several hours for Morgan to draw the intricate tattoo. Harry looked behind him and was astonished by Morgan Freeman's craftsmenwork. Morgan had told him that he was a master of the tattoo art. Harry didn't believe him Morgan offered to give Harry a tattoo to prove it. Harry, not being one to decline a challenge, had accepted and that's how they got here.

"Well? Didn't I tell you?" Morgan asked. "You're right, that's such a good design. It looks just like I described." Harry said, still in awe of the beauty tattooed on his buttcheek.

"But I have to ask, Harry, why did you want me to tattoo a goose?"

"It's a long story, Morgan, but in summary, Goose is my spirit animal? It represents kindness, chastity, diligence, charity, and the love and faith of humankind and all the creatures of the earth." Harry told him.

"Yes, you truly do have those quality." Morgan said.

Harry began to reminisce about the story of the goose, and felt the need to share it with Morgan. "You know, there is a story about the goose that has been passed down through my family for generations. It goes a little like this-" Harry began.

"Harry, shut up. I don't care about the stupid family history of your stupid animal." Morgan interjected.

Harry looked hurt, but Morgan didn't apologize. He knew it was for his own good. Harry would have run away from Morgan, but he couldn't because of the fresh tattoo on his asshole.

A few hours later, Harry was able to walk again. Harry was lying asleep on the floor in his cell. The rain outside was falling down in torrents and his prison-issue orange overcoat with his prison number on the back was wet from the rain. The warden came and visited Harry in his cell in the middle of the night while Harry was asleep. He was accompanied by three prison guards.

"Potter, we need to have a chat." He said and he motioned for the guards to get harry.

As the three prison guards charged at him, Harry sat bolt upright and reached under a pile of grubby laundry for his 34. Automatic. But it wasn't there because he was in prison.

Harry stood up just in time to be hit square in the stomach by one of the guards truncheon. Harry bent forward as the air was knocked out of his lungs. He was quickly hit in the upper back as well as the face by the truncheons of the other two guards. Harry was knocked down on all fours by the blows, but quickly tried to stand back up.

"It would be easier for you if you didn't try to fight." The warden calmly said.

Harry stood up and punched one guard in the face, sending his teeth flying in one direction and his nose in the other. Harry was then hit in the jaw and solar plexus at the same time and fell to the floor in pain. He was quickly restrained and blindfolded. The other inmates in the cell block began to get rowdy, shouting and banging against the bars of their cell.

"QUIET YOU SCUMBAGS!" The warden shouted. Everything quickly went quiet.

Harry Potter was awoken in that morning by a metallic banging noise. He opened his eyes and strained his rental enhancers. Once his augmented vision corrected itself, he noticed the noise was from a fairly bored looking prison guard smacking a truncheon against the cell bars.

"Up ye get ya pathetic chowderfish!" He said with a thick Scottish accent, "It's time fer ye trial. Come on."

Harry got up and walked out of the cell. He was then strapped and shackled to a trolly and surrounded by guards with shotguns to make sure he didn't escape. Slowly, they rolled him down the cell block past the cells of rowdy inmates beckoning for him to come within arms reach.

"I'll be waiting for you when you come back, Potter! I can't wait to ride the Hogwarts Express!" One particularly spunky inmate ejaculated as Harry rolled past.

Harry swallowed.


	16. Chapter 16

Eventually, Harry was led to a courtroom crowded with people. The judged regarded Harry coolly as he puffed his cigarette. Sitting in the prosecution bench was Cole Phelps. On the defendants table was Phoenix Wright and his nubile psychic preteen sidekick. A jury of his peers had been provided and they all sat bored in the jury bench smoking cigarettes.

"Order in the court!" The judge yelled, slamming his gravel on the floor. The courtroom was silent.

The court began as any ceremony does. After the official swearing-in was complete, the prosecution began its prosecution.

"Harry is accused of robbery in the first degree." Miles Edgeworth began.

"Is this true!?" The judge interjected.

"No! Harry screamed!

"Objection!" Phoenix Wright yelled.

"OVERRULED!" Cole Phelps calmly stated, pushing asides the prosecuting attorney and making his stand at the prosecution's stand.

"Order in the court!" The judge yelled, slamming his gravel on the floor. The courtroom was silent.

"Now, I will prove to the court how this is possible. How this, the boy who lived, took up a life of crime and passion to steal from corporations!" Cole continued, "The evidence and testimony I am about to present will show, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it is beyond a reasonable doubt that Harry Potter is guilty!"

The courtroom audience began talking wildly. Harry grumbled, unamused, before lighting a cigarette.

"Order in the court!" The judge yelled, slamming his gravel on the floor. The courtroom was silent.

Cole gestured. "I would like to call my first witness to the stand. Meagan Read, you may approach the bench. Dr. Reed approached the bench with trepidation. "Now," said Cole "Tell us everything you know about Harry Potter, serial arsonist and serial robber baron and convicted highwayman and litterer and murder victim." Meagan began to cry into her dress. "OH IT WAS AWFUL" Meagan said. "He hit me with sticks all the time and I was never allowed to leave the apartment when we were together~!"

Harry stared at her in bemusement. He felt betrayed. Dr. Reed...was LYING!

"Yes," Dr. Reed continued as she kept speaking, "He bragged about the drugs he would sell and take, or the people he would kill or even the robberies he planned to commit! He told me one Thursday night that he planned to rob the 1-15 out of Kansas making a gold bullion delivery to the bank in Oakum Pigknuckle, Tennesse."

The judge slammed his navel on the desk. "H'ordeurves in the court!" And a little french man dressed as a waiter came in and laid a tray with a roast chicken on the judge's pulpit.

Dr. Reed kept speaking as she continued..."But that's not all of it. He once came home with a dead cyborg bear and told me to gut it and clean it and cook it for supper!"

Phoenix Wright stared at Harry in horror. "Cyborg Bears are endangered!" he whispered. "This will put a huge dent in our hole case.. Harry did you really murder a cyborg bear?" "Yes, but that's not how..." said Harry.

"AN ADMISSION OF GUILT!" screamed Cole. "NOW YOU WILL GO TO PRISON FOR TEN THOUSAND YEARS!"

"OBJECTION!" YELLED PHEONIX WRIGHT! "WHEN CONSULTING WITH MY CLIENT IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT THE PRIVACY OF MY CLIENT IS UBTAINED AT ALL TIMES IN THE COURT! THAT DOESN'T COUNT!"

The judge slammed his gravel down on the floor and shouted "Order in the court." The court fell silent..

THEN COLE TURNED TO THE DEFENDANT AND SCREAMED "DO YOU WISH TO CROSS EXAMINE THE WITNESS YET?"

"Okay Mr. Reed." said Phoenix, warming up. "How did it happen that you and Harry lived together?"

Dr. Reed shook her head. "Well, er..."

"When did Harry move in with you?" Pheonix asked. "You say he never let him leave your apartment, yet...something seems off about your testimony."

"It's true" protested Dr. Reed in a gross pantomime of earnestness. "He never let me leave when he was my lover. He kept me inside like a caged animal...And sometimes he would tell me I would be killed." she finished lamely.

Phoenix Wright nodded. "So you say you were in a relationship with Harry?"

"Yes" Dr. Reed answered.

"You only broke up when Harry was in prison?"

"Yes" said Dr. Reed. Phoenix nodded.

"So then..." Phoenix paused, placed the flats of his palms on his stand for a moment, and then pointed straight at Dr. Reed. "HOW THE FUCK DO YOU EXPLAIN THESE PHOTOS?!" Phoenix pulled out a full, hardcover photo album and slammed it down on his stand. "I wish to submit this photo album as evidence to the court!

The court fell silent. "Order in the court!" The judge slammed his hammer on the counter! The court fell silent.

Cole screamed "OBJECTION! YOU CAN''T BRING NEW EVIDENCE INTO THE CASE!"

The judge slammed his navel down on the table "Order in the court!" he yelled.

The judge ignored him. "It is relevant to the case. Therefore, I accept the new evidence."

Harry clapped like a retarded seal. His team was winning!

Phoenix continued. "How do you explain the contradiction, Dr. Reed?"

Dr. Reed huffed and puffed and began to sob piteously. "IT WAS HIM!" she yelled, pointing at Cole. "HE MADE ME LIE ABOUT THE TESTIMONY TO CONVICT HARRY BECAUSE HE HATES HARRY!" she confessed. Phoenix nodded. "I understand."

"OBJECTION!" yelled Cole. "If Dr. Reed was solely motivated by me forcing her into it, how do you explain...THIS!?" Cole threw a moldy steak from his front pocket across the courtroom. Hitting Phoenix in the face. The court went wild and people started screaming and setting fire to the benches in ecstasy. "ORDER IN THE COURT!" screamed the Judge, slamming his roast chicken repeatedly upon the desk sending little bits of roast chicken flying every which way. The bailiff passed out.

Phoenix looked horrified as the steak slowly slid down his face. He grabbed it and flung it on to the ground, where a roomba quickly consumed it. "All right, doctor. Can we get your testimony again, but this time with no lies? Normally you'd have committed perjury and that would have been a major felony, but since we didn't actually get you to recite an oath or anything, you're in the clear. Just, be honest, okay?"

Dr. Reed sobbed at the stand, and only managed to point at Cole and say "Liar.." before collapsing onto the stand in a flood of tears.

"Well," said Phoenix "If there isn't anything else, I think I have proven with satisfactory evidence that my client is, in fact, not guilty."

"YOU HAVEN'T EVEN BEEN ASKED TO PLEAD YET!" Cole screamed in protest, but the Judge slammed his hammer down on Cole. "The defense has stated its case. Harry, you are free."

Then, the judge turned to Cole "Cole Phelps, you are guilty to making up evidence. I sentence you to be guilty of the charges which have been laid upon Harry." And then the judge slammed his hammer on the Cole's desk pressing the secret button and dropping Cole into the tube. "I AM THE LAW" the judge stated calmly, then belched sending chicken bones flying across the court, which was still on fire.

The judge then calmly exited to his rear office. Cole slid down a long glass tube in a panic, tumbling in the darkness. He had no idea what awaited him until he landed at the bottom, but hen he realized with horror he had been dropped into a pit full of killer African bees!

"OH GOD NOT THE BEES!" Cole screamed. "OH GOD NOT THE BEES, OH GOD They're IN MY EYES, AWEYEUGHYLGUHYUGLHYL1" And then Cole was no more.

Harry frolicked out of the courtroom with a cigarette in his mouth, feeling like a new man now that his name had been cleared. There was still, however, the issue of Hogwarts to confront. Almost like a convenient plot point, Lupin stepped from the shadows and greeted Harry in Japanese, because he was very cultured. "Ohaiyo" (hello) Wakinishoyou damaske namaste shen sin yun fat chow, nin yun fat ding." (Welcome to auspicious home, I am Lupin you are Harry they go the place of the silence so they may converse in the dark tongues of the ancestors like the gods of old, tea leaves where is the bathroom located I am the chairman (rough translation))


	17. Chapter 17

Lupin met Harry outside the courtroom and the two retired to a little noodle place just down the street called the Lucky Dragoon, a dingy storefront lit by a glowing neon Spaniard mounted on a mule. The air inside the shop was thick with cigarette smoke, and the windows rattled in their poorly set frames as the rain beat against them. Lupin and Harry ordered Pad Thai and sat at a little formica table in the corner. While they were waiting for their food Lupin offered Harry a cup of herbal tea, which Harry accepted. His first drink since prison.

The rain poured down outside in torrents which was why the trenchcoat Lupin and Harry were wearing was dripping wet from the cascade.

Lupin posed him a question. "Harry, now that you're free, what are you going to do?"

Harry paused.

"Well Lupin, Dumbledore is actually Diablo but nobody believes me, and he possesses a device capable of ripping holes through dimensions. He's the devil himself, and he's backed by the Hogwarts research team and research institute... I will have to try and stop him."

Lupin nodded as the waiter slid the pad Thai across the table. "You're right, Harry. Dumbledore must be stopped. That's why I came to you.."

"Oh?" asked Harry.

"What do you know about the order...of the phoenix?"

Harry paused for a moment to think. "I think he was my lawyer or something. I'm not really clear on that one."

"No." said Lupin, shaking his head, "The order, well...back in the fifties, they were a wing of the government designed to fight supernatural throats from worlds beyond that worked in tandem with the Hogwarts research facility to preserve the earth from supernatural threats."

Harry nodded as Lupin continued with the expository monologue "But then all that changed in the eighties. When Dolores Umbridge became the Archmage at Hogwarts she shamed and destroyed the order of the phoenix, forcing us into hiding just as Dumbledore came aboard."

"The eighties..." said Harry wistfully.

"Yes" said Lupin "And then Hogwarts became something different. Their mission changed. Instead of protecting the people of earth they developed weapon technology to fuel Dumbledore's crusade.

Harry ate a slice of the pizza they had ordered. "But Lupin, what does this have to do with the order of the phoenix?"

"Well, you see Harry, the order of the phoenix was never truly destroyed. A few elite agents stayed on when Umbridge cut our funding. They knew they had to stay and stop what the Hogwarts research facility had become. In response, Dumbledore founded a black ops specialty team. He called it the DA. Dumbledore's army. And now we fight them. Order of the phoenix versus Dumbledore's army, in a shadow war: war in the shadows."

Harry lit a cigarette. "I'm in." He shook hands with Lupin.

"Now," said Harry, "Take me to your HQ."

"That won't be necessary." said Lupin. "Check please" he added. The waiter came over. "Severus, meet Harry" Lupin said to the waiter. The greasy haired waiter nodded, and Lupin put on a very serious, dramatic face. "Welcome to the order of the phoenix."

Some time later, Harry Potter regarded Snape and Lupin coolly. They all lit cigarettes and glared at each other from across all three corners of the card table they were sitting around in the dark, dimly lit, back room of an Italian restaurant on the outskirts of Montreal by an airport. There was a ceiling fan that created shadows that spun around the room much like a weiner-dog spinning as it chases its own tail for hours and hours on end without rest much like an animal that continues to repeat an activity over and over ceaselessly without end forever until eternity and beyond as it spun smoke from multiple cigars and cigarettes and pipes and other assorted smoking instruments. The window was shrouded by a curtain, but the tungsten glow of the streetlights in the alley outside the window was spilling through the cracks and tears and holes in the curtain. The raindrops were creating shadows in the room because of the light spilling in through the cracks and tears and holes in the curtain. Harry regarded Snape and Lupin coolly.

Harry was wearing a dark tan trenchcoat that was dripping wet from the rain. His dark black fedora was dripping wet from the rain but kept Harry's red hair arid dry like an arab spring but his hat was acting like a catch basin and the water was pooling in the natural crevasse-like chasm's and then overflow like mini-waterfalls; Harry hated waterfalls. He could barely light a cigarette from the rain that was pouring down upon him from the rooftops.

Harry regarded Lupin and Snake with indifference as he saw them look him all over with their eyes. The three of them lit cigarettes. Snape regarded Lupin. Lupin was a Wherewolf, and like all wherewolves, that means that he was black.

Lupid gestured wildly with his cigarette "Now Harry, I know you have many questions, but we have very little time, so let me explain everything to you now, Harry."

And Lupin did just that, he told Harry everything. He told Harry about The Order of the Phoenix, or, as Harry liked to call it so people didn't know what he was talking about so he could talk about sensitive information in public places like the mall or a restaurant or the bus without fear of someone clewing in to what he was talking about, The Order.

"Now Harry, I suppose you want to know about The Order of the Phoenix, yes?" Lupin asked, as he lit a cigarette. Lupin took several tries at trying to light his damp cigarette with a damp match both of which were soaking wet from the rain and dripping with rainwater.

"Let me help you with that, Lupin!" Harry exclaimed. He wanted to impress his new boss so he took out his wand and cast a spell "INSENDIO!" Harry shouted and the wand shot fire like a dragons breath shot forth unto the cigarette spectacularly and instantly lighting the cigarette in an instant in spectacular fashion. Lupin looked impressed and Harry smiled at his accomplishment. He loved to use magic and would use it at any occasion for any purpose to fight or just show off to friends or make his life easier.

'That boy uses magic too much, he doesn't know or understand the consequences of his actions nor does he care to know or understand them. I see him all the time flaunting that wand around to impress everyone and kill his enemies like fodder to a wood-chipper.' Snake thought.

Lupin looked at Snape with a cautionary gaze, cocking an eyebrow as if to warn him not to say what was on his mind. Lupin and Snape had worked together for a long time, even, once, been lovers, and it was as if they could instinctively sense what the other was thinking without having to think about what the other was thinking.

Harry regarded Snape coolly.

Snape was a man in his early thirties with greasy long hair that was in a ponytail at the back, with a few strings of hair draping down the front. He had green eyes with wrinkles surrounding them as well as a furrowed brow. Snape was wearing a tan turtleneck undershirt with a dark brown leather jacket that had orange patches and a brown/tan-ish trim. He also had an earpiece/microphone in his ear.

"Anyway, Harry, I suppose you want to know about The Order of the Phoenix, yes?" Lupin asked, lighting a cigarette. Harry nodded casualty. "I need to know. I have to know what happened to my father and this is the only way."

Lupin lit a cigarette and continued.

"The Order of the Phoenix was founded in 1954 by none other than Aldus Dumbledore." Lupin began to explain.

"What!" Harry exclaimed as he interjected, "But I though Dubledor was the devil!"

"Oh Harry, that's where you're wrong, let me continue." Lupin stated as he smoked. Harry and Snape lit cigarettes.

"The Order of the Phoenix was founded in 1984 by none other than Albus Dumbledore" Lupin continued "He started the organization to uphold the law and fight for justice to save the world from evil always no matter what. Everyone loved us. We were like superstars on the racetrack fighting crime from one criminal to the next. We jailed many criminals and killed many more. The police gave us commendations and the mayor gave us keys to the city. We eventually built a research facility to help us fight crime. We called it Hogwarts. It was Dumbledores pride and joy and his crown achievement."

Lupin paused to take a swig of his cigarettes.

""But everything changed in the year 1984 when Umbridge took over Dubledores mind with mind contrrol and treachery and sexual favours." Lupin spat at the name, he hated Umbridge more than anything; He even hated him more than Dumbledore. "So Dumbledore became evil and under her control. And then he vowed to destroy The Order of the Phoenix and everything it had ever accomplished. The other members of The Order went into hiding, fighting to survive every day like a child in a third world country fighting to survive every day because he and his family are poor or maybe he doesn't even have a family and is on his own without any help from anyone so he is trying to survive by any way he can even is that means fighting to survive every day. I took over control of the order and rallied all the members I could find and tried to fight back against Dumbledore, but he was too good. None of our operatives were close to being as masterful in the art of stealth, war, strategy, and luck like Dumbledore was."

Lupin paused again to light a cigarette and think quietly in his head where no one could hear him so he could voice something private '... The only person who has ever been able to surpass him is you, Harry.' He thought. Harry and Snape lit cigarettes.

"Dumbledore created a new organization to exploit the resources that the Hogwarts research facility offered. He called it 'Dumbledore's Army'. They hide in the shadows, just like us, and they are hell-belt on tracking us all down and killing every last one of us. And now we fight a war in the shadows; We call it The Invisible War."

Harry gasped as he lit a cigarette and took a long puff and exhaled..

"Harry, the three of us sitting at this table are the last three members left of The Order. Every day we will be hunted, we will always have to look over our shoulder, wondering if the gentleman in the adjacent line at the supermarket checkout counter is really just buying some bread, or following us and watching our every move. We will have to fight this war from the shadows, we can't get help now. Not with Dumbledore under the mind control of Umbridge."

"But how can we stop them? It seems hopeless." Harry pleaded.

Lupin smiled at his revelation, "You're right, Harry; It is."

Lupin turned his back to the Harry and took out a cigar and lit it. "Harry, we are the only ones left who are able to stop Umbridge's plot to take over the world. We may die here, but we die with a purpose."

Harry was confused, "So what can we do?"

Lupin smiled, "Harry, we have one way that we can outmaneuver them. We have to secretly befriend their agents without them knowing we're part of The Order, and coax them into revealing their secrets. We have to start sleeping with the enemy." Lupin winked.

Harry nodded understandingly. He knew what Lupin meant.

"But you can't just go up to people and tell them you're real identity, that would give you too much attention and everyone already knows who Harry Potter The Boy Who Lived is and that he works with us. You need to create an alias so that you can meet with people but they won't know who you are." Lupin said.

"I understand, so what do we do now?" Harry asked.

Lupin smiled, "I'm glad you asked, Harry, I'm glad you asked?"


	18. Chapter 18

Harry sat in the elevator uncomfortably, the voice of Lupin still echoing in his noggin, "Next you should go to the Dojo on sub-level 65598 of the Order's secret underground lair. There, you will meet one of our best operatives, and our close range combat expert, Cho Chang." He looked up as the elevator rang, signaling that he had reached his desired floor, sub=level 90210.

"Hi, I'm Harry Potter The Boy Who- Wha!? FUCK!" Harry said calmly as he looked up as he walked out of the elevator to introduce himself politely to find a barrage of combat throwing knives hurdling towards him with a vengeance. Harry's neural reactor prosthetic implants kicked in and he dove out of the way gracefully, only to be hit by a torrent of katanas and scimitars which he could only dodge 79% of them.

"Too slow." An Asian-looking Chinese woman with black hair who stood 5'12" with shoulder-length black hair and Harry's mathematical enhancers calculated a 36C cup. She was wearing a long white Kimono, that was dripping wet from the rain, that contrasted heavily with her narrow black eyes. Harry noted that she looked like a real commando. She was holding 7 katanas and 37 knives in one hand, and was smoking a cigarette in the other, "I expected more from Harry Potter The Boy Who Lived." Cheng demanded as she smoked her cigarettes in a sultry fashion. Harry loved her.

Harry pulled the swords and knives are other utensils out of his body and lunged for Cho, activating his rocket-boost implants to boost him with rockets. Cheng moved like a lightning bolt, but Harry was more like a Nimbus 2K. Which Harry remembered getting in his first year at Hogwarts academy for wizards in secret by his favorite teacher Professor Black so he could join the swim team. Harry remembered his serene peaceful childhood dreamland and took a moment to reminisce with a few cigars. Anyway, Harry violently rushed forward with his katanas in one hand and his fist in the other as he rushed violently towards Cho Cheng.

Chin was more prepared for this than he though. She was fast, unnaturally fast. She was strong, but not too strong. Their Katanas screamed through the air before colliding violently like strikes of lightning. The dojo rang with the sounds of the incredible power harry focused through his blade at Cho, who retaliated by doing an overarcing swing with her legs and catching Harry in a headlock. Harry used his augments to thrust his head off and his body crushed Cho into a pile before he reattached his head. "Cyborg, remember?" Harry asked. Cho Chang cross-chopped him in the suplex with her fist, and they rolled onto a mat and slammed into each other with their blades. Cho then wrapped herself around his body in an almost pretzel-like manner. Harry was admiring her flexibility when she twisted herself and almost snapped him in half like a bagel. Harry saw an opening in her defenses and flipped himself around her with a flash kick. Cho responded by mounting him and furiously pounding him with her fists. Harry knocked her back onto the mat, and Cho grabbed him by the collar and he flew forward with her. They both froze. Harry was on top of her. hot and sweating. He was painfully aware of her labored breathing, the excited look in her eye, the hot swelling in his groin augments.

"Not too bad for a hanzer." Cho gasped. The moment of tension passed as the two combatants exhaled, and Cho rolled off of Harry and reattached her dislocated limbs while Harry did the same. They both lit cigarettes, and Harry rose to his feet.

"What do you do here?" he asked.

"I am a master of kung fu." she explained.

"Oh." said Harry. He had no idea. The thought that Cho was a martial artist swirled around in his head knocking his thoughts into disarray as he crept towards the elevator. Cho cheerfully waved goodbye to him as he slid into the chute.

Harry met the demolitions expert Colin Creepy in the order's secret explosives lab. He saw Colin wearing a mech suit to protect him from the high explosive munitions he was building.

"Hello." yelled Harry up at Colin in his mecha. "I'm supposed to meet you"

Colin hopped out of the mecha and jumped down to talk to Harry, cigar hanging from his mouth. He looked like Wolverine from X-men.

"You're Harry, huh?" he said, sizing him up, looking him up and down, giving him a stare.

"Well don't go thinking you're going to replace me." he said chomping on his cigar. "Because I am a demolitions expert. I served in Vietnam, Korea, America, Japan, Russia, Mongolia, Yemen, Cape Town, Y2K, Australia, Korea 2, Greenland, CANADA, FUCKING CANADA MAN I WAS THERE!" He suddenly started screaming, foam coming out of his face. "WE WERE BEHIND THE FUCKING IRON CURTAIN MAN YOU DONT EVEN KNOIW MY BUDDIES DYING FACE DOWN IN THE MAPLE SYRUP SNOW TREETAPS STICKIN OUT OF THEIR HEADS THERE WAS LEAD FLYIN EVERYWHERE ALL TO KEEP US SAFE FROM THE FUCKING COMMUNITS!"

"What happened?" asked Harry capriciously, curiously, cautiously.

"There weren't any communists in Canada. High command FUCKING LIED TO US THE LYING WHORES IT WAS ALL ABOUT MONEY NOT FREEDEOM NOT AMERICA JUST FUCKING MONEY FOR THEIR CORRUPT FUCKING WHORE WIVES AND DAUGHTERS AND SONS WHO WOULD WASTE THAT SHIT ON A FUCKING POTTERY DEGREE OR SOMETHING!" Colin screamed, throwing grenades around the room. He put a stick of dynamite in his mouth and lit it like a cigar and chewed it furiously. "IT AIN'T ME, SON, IT AIN'T ME! I DIDN'T SIGN UP TO FIGHT NO WAR FOR NO GOVERNMENT BOYS! THEY TOOK MY LEGS, MY EYES, MY BRAIN, MY PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS HORRIBLE FACIAL SCARRING! Anyways...don't forget."

Harry nodded politely. "Right. Understood." Harry made a mental note that Colin might be a little bit unstable, snuffed the dynamite's fuse while Colin wasn't looking, and returned to the elevator.

Even later, Harry Potter, Lupin, Snape, Cho Cheng, Luna Lovegood, and Colin all sat around a table in the command situation room. "Alright, folks." Lupin began as he shone his laser pointer in Harry's eyes so that they would reflect onto the charts, and so that he would know if Harry wasn't paying attention. "Now that we've all been introduced to our new member, let's take him out for a test drive."

Cho grinned slyly, lighting a cigarette and blowing smoke in Harry's face, "So what have we got?"

"Luna has discovered some intelligence that the DA has set up a forward listening post in Rome. We need to covertly sneak in there and stealthily bug the place, find out what they're up to, and leave without a trace." Lupin said. "This should be a simple enough job, but be careful, the DA has good defense systems in place."

Lupin handed everyone an airplane ticket to Italy, "These are counterfeit because we don't have the funds right now to buy real plane tickets. Make sure airport security doesn't trace them."

"How did we get those?" asked Harry. He never saw the slap coming. "Shut up." Snape explained.

Cho grinned wildly. "I get the window seat!" She shouted.

"As if it even matters." Harry mumbled. He never saw the slap coming. "Shut up" Cho Chang said.

"Now that you have the details," Lupin said, "You must travel to Rome. When in Rome, do what your team members tell you to do. You might be a hotshot new agent just off the tracks fresh from the race ready to catch and kills the criminals of the world but we'll show you how to really fight..." Lupin paused dramatically, as if it were a scene from a movie trailer..."The invisible war."

Harry, Cho Chedng, Luna, and Colin sat in the hotel room waiting to begin the mission. "Harry, I know this is your fist mission, so we'll be doing it by the book." Luna said. "There are three phases to any mission: Planning, Execution, and Exfoliation. We remember it by using PEE."

"But-" said Harry. "SILENCE!" Colin yelled through the hotel walls.

"PEE is life. PEE keeps us alive out in the field. Without PEE, you are powerless and uninformed, and properly equipped with PEE you are like a mighty pack of Mexican jumping panthers ready to take the faces off of unsuspecting children."

"Aren't those a myth?" asked Harry. Luna giggled coldly like a machine person over the telephone. "No, they just operate invisibly, by using PEE. Like you will. Like we do."

Harry nodded excitedly. Luna continued explaining. "First, the big P. Planning. This also includes recon and it the information gathering phase where you hang around and take pictures and stuff and write out some plans. I'll use a screencap of Google maps to make us a digital whiteboard and then Colin will probably draw dicks all over it."

"THAT ONLY HAPPENED ONCE" Colin screamed "STOP BRINGING IT UP LUNA"

Luna giggled coldly, like a machine p-Eisenhower the telephone. "So we assemble and plan a plan of attack which is the plan we used when we attack."

A mere half hour later, Harry sipped from his McDonalds© Oreo© McFlurry© in the back of the car while playing on his cellular telephone while Cho took photos with her camera from the front seat. There was a tourist trap style restaurant sitting next to the Holy See, covered in smokestacks and whirring machinery and with a big generator on it and stuff. The Sistine Chapel loomed large over the store next to it, a monolithic representation of the power of the modern catholic church. Scores of faithful flocked to it beneath black umbrellas, like a legion of carrion birds. Harry felt bothered despite himself, unsettled in the presence of so many silent, ignorant soles passing him by. To distract himself, he brought up the mission map on his PDA and noted the sewer entrances and exits and made note of a nest of sparrows who there were a lot of nearby on a roof where they nested to be so that they could live there in harmony with the city except when the shit all over everything. because that's how Rome works

Luna's soft, cold mechanical voice sang in his ear. "Once you are all done with Prep, the big P, you proceed to execution phase, when you bust in, grab the drugs and run, or whatever it is your supposed to be doing on this mission. No matter what it is, don't draw dicks on the digital whiteboard."

Colin snubbed his cigar out on the expensive hotel snozzberry pattern wallpaper with irritation.

"Harpsichord to all operatives, come in." Snape said over the radio headsets, "We're going into enemy receiving range, changing to encrypted radio frequency, all operatives use aliases from now on."

"Operative Banana here, standing by." Cho Cheng said through her headset.

"Operative Apple-blossom here." Luna responded.

"Operative Peach on standby." Harry said.

"OPERATOVE BOOMDADDY READY TO RECK SHIT!" Colin whispered.

"'Wretch' is spelled with a 'w' Cloin." said Luna.

"Shut up, Luna." Colin responded.

"Okay, you all know the plan. NUCL3ARSNAK3 here running comma." Snape said. "Luna will provide technical support from her terminal in the van. Cho, Harry, and Colin will infiltrate the compound once Luna has disabled their security."

"I've gained access to their network, shutting down all systems and running cameras on a loop." Luna relayed.

Colin nonchalantly wandered out of the inconspicuous van they were using as a command post/getaway vehicle and banged hard on the back doors to signal that the coast was clear. Harry and Cho burst out of the van as Colin fired his grappling hook gun up at the building. He grunted in frustration as it bounced off, "Damn piece of bile." He cussed. Stuffing the defective gadget in his tan trenchcoat, and lighting a cigarette. The rain was falling down in torrents as if it were a form of pathetic fallacy to help describe the scene.

"I guess I have to do all the work around here." Cho sighed, as she flipped her waist length brown hair and gracefully jumped from wall to wall until she reached the roof of the Sistine Chapel, her dark kimono with several katanas and ninja stars strapped to her back softly blowing in the gentle midnight breeze. Cho looked back down at Harry with longing in her eyes, before reaching out a hand as Harry shot his grappling hook augmentation implant out from his hand for Cho to catch, hoisting Harry and Colin up in one fell swoop. Harry noted her strength and beauty under the dim nights sky. Harry loved her.

"We're on the roof of the objective point, now cutting into the ventilation shafts." Colin relayed.

Harry Cho, and Colin took up positions at their designated shafts and began slicing through with their welding torches.

"This is where you three have to split up. Cho, you're going to bug their communications terminal. Colin, you're setting up Intellicams© Intelligent Camera™ systems so we can watch their movements. Harry, you have to gain access to their server room so I can use your neural augmentations to create a bridge between the networks and proxy my way into their systems to set up a worm bug. Once you have all completed your objectives, you will rendezvous in the second floor aft chamber men's bathroom for exfil." Luna explained over the radio.

Cho smiled slyly as she, Colin, and Harry nodded as they took one last drag from their cigarettes. and jumped into the ventilation systems.

"It looks like they've all gone out for a nice dinner and a few drinks. I don't see any signs of life in the Vatican." Luna said.

Harry crawled his way through the ventilation shafts, using his augmentations to monitor his location, heart rate, respiration, and also his breathing. After several hours of navigating the labyrinthine layout of the Papal ventilation system, Harry made his way to the server room and cut his way inside. Banks of dark monitors flickered and hummed, green LEDs blinking in the server racks. The room was cold, condensation formed on the walls, and a single security guard patrolled the corridors of machinery with a critical eye. Harry knew he must be very careful. He crouched, and began to slowly creep up behind the guard, ducking behind the shelves with a silent swiftness when the guard swept his flashlight behind him. Harry slid across the floor on his belly like a python, silent as a snake, and rose to a standing position behind the guard

"Harry, what's your status?" Snape asked.

Harry froze as the guard turned and stared at him, goggle-eyed.

"What the hell are you doing in here?!" he said.

"I'm uh, I'm selling these fine leather jackets." Harry replied, before punching the guard between the eyes. The guard spun in a circle and landed in a heap, instantly unconcious.

"I'm in." said Harry "Patch me through to Luna."

"Harry this is Luna here, what's your status?" Luna asked.

"I'm in." said Harry as he scanned the room. It was alight with the whirring noise of the cooling system and the blinking of lights off of the server racks covering all several corners of the room from floor to ceiling. There were workstations and hard drives everywhere over the floor and even some nailed to the ceiling. The wiring was a mess. "It looks like your intel was right. This haphazard setup indicates that they haven't been here long." Harry mumbled as he lit his zippo to light a cigarette.

Harry was about to take a step forward when he noticed the smoke from his pipe revealed a red laser beam streaming about an inch away from his nose.

"Luna, are you sure you disabled all the security systems?" Harry asked. Trying his best to keep still as he patched Luna through to his rental augments. "Oh shit, Harry. They must have the server room security on a desperate network. Hold on as I scan frequency channel for the SSID." Harry laid motionless as he waited, desperately smoking to keep himself from moving too much.

Several minutes passed which felt like hours to Harry, but ended up only being about twelve and a half minutes. "Okay Harry, sorry to keep you waiting. This network was a bit more difficult to crack covertly, so I had to wait to use a man-in-the-middle attack. I'm disabling all security systems... Now." Harry signed a relief as the lasers faded and blinked off.

Luna then used Harry's neural processor augments to hook into the server and use a defibrillator grid matrix assembly to plant the bug without a trace.

"Here we go. You can now meet up with the others at the rendezvous pint." Luna said as she gave Harry back control of his bodily functions.

Harry made his way to the forward lobby to meet up with Cho and Colin. Cho was already there drinking some scotch as she waited restlessly quenching her thirst in the moonlit urinal. She looked over at Harry with longing eyes and Harry returned her gaze with vigor.

"Uhh... Where's Colin?" He asked.

Cho sighed a frustrated sigh of frustration as she talked into her radio headset, sighing frustratedly as she did so, "Harpsichord, what's Colins status?"

"Colin, do you read me? What's your status?" Luna asked.

"We're in the middle of a mission, Luna, don't use names stupid." Colin responded. "Anyway I'm almost there. I ran into some trouble, but nothing an explosive solution couldn't fix."

"You didn't do anything too noticeable, did you?" Luna asked, worried.

"No, they're just minus one painting of the Mona Lisa sculpture." Colin responded nonchalantly.

"The Mona Lisa? What's that?" Harry asked.

"It's the one with the picture of the guy with the finger hanging out with God." Cho said wisely as she smiled slyly.

"Yeah, that's the one." Colin said as he stepped through the door in a cloud of cordite vapor.

And now the most important part of the mission structure, the core of PEE, the heart of PEE and what makes PEE strongest: Expatriation! ?The escape from the scene of the mission with complete nondetection, with nobody noticing you were ever there are know that you came to there. The way of the ninja samurai ghost viper!" Snape explained hastily as he fished for his jacket pocket through the things. But then he continued. "To do this we plan very careful fully so you never make any noise while you do what you do best: inedible war."

Snape pointed to a slide rule on the wall.

"Extrapolation means sticking to the mission, it means trusting your team mates, but most importantly it means that you STICK TO THE MISSION! You never go rogue, you never make a snap decision that could hurtle the Order into jeopardy or even onto the monopoly board for that matter! But when the chips are down and your friends are dying all around you screaming on their voodoo remember it's beacuase YOU DIDN'T STICK TO THE MISSION HARRY!

Harry wasn't listening. He was on his smart phone, texting his twitter.

The team smoked cigarettes in the room while Luna ran a defrag on their mice. Once the satnav was synced to the SCUSI ports and SCUBA drives, Luna dispatched a chopper to their location.

Harry looked back in the window of the Sistine Chapel and gasped in horror, memories of Hogwarts and Diablodore flooding back to him like when a hydroelectric damn bursts and floods the countryside.

There, standing in the courtyard of the Vatican, was a great pair of dark, glossy metal beams standing several stories tall. Red lightning arced up and down them, and a hole in reality was torn between them. Beyond, Harry saw the familiar landscape of Hell. Harry sank to his knees in horror and despair, fearing for the lives of the many innocent people.

Cho and Colin looked back and saw what he saw and reacted in a similar manner.

"I have to stop it." Harry said as he rose to his feet and lightning rolled in the background as thunder flashed. Rain poured down the roof of the vatican, yet a hot and sulfurous smell rose from the courtyard. Harry headbutted the window, which shattered outwards in a spray of fine glass, setting off every alarm within the Vatican. He pulled himself up onto the roof and began to run.

Dumbledore had been here, he thought. Only him and Dr. Kleiner could open up this portal. That makes two portals, at least, Harry thought. This was worse than the Event Horizon incident at Black Mesa inc. Harry thought as he jumped from rooftop to rooftop. Below, he could see the Vatican was plunged into chaos, with acolytes running for cover.

"HARRY YOU STUPID FOOL GET THE HELL BACK HERE DON'T FORGET ABOUT PEE!" Colin shouted.

"Harry you've gone rouge I'm pulling the plug on this operation!" Luna shouted as she deactivated all of Harry's augmentations in one fell swoop. Harry knew Luna was about to disable him, so he jammed his fist into his chest to activate the secret button that detatches his head from his body. Harry then grabbed his head and began running with it like a footballer. Memories of the big game he played in prison rushed back to him as he remembered Morgan Freeman's face of joy as he scored the final hang ten to win the day. Harry wiped the memory from his mind forever as he tossed his head at the portal to hell, aiming for the MUFFPUFFIN device within to deactivate it. Harry's head bounced off the device with not even so much as a scratch.

"Damn it, I'm going in after him!" Cheng yelled as she grabbed Colin and jumped through the window after Harry.

"Cho, Colin, get back here right now!" Luna screamed through the headset, but Colin just turned his headset off. The three agents jumped down to another, lower rooftop but went right through and then emerged into the courtyard somewhat sheepishly through a modest wooden door on the ground floor. A force of demonic creatures, horned and knobbly, poured forth from the portal, but Harry and the others were stopped.

"I'll handle this." A gruff sounding robotic sounding voice echoed through the chambers. Cho, Harry, and Colin looked back to see a man who looked to be in his early sixties standing eight and a half feet tall. He was wearing a plain white robe and tiny skull cap thing that Popes wear. He was also a cyborg/robot/hanzer. They all gasped as the recognized him from the news as Mecha Pope Francis III.

As they were distracted, a demon jumped through the portal. It was a charismatic man with dark hair and a mustache who was a vegetarian. He roared in pain and defiance as his crudely grafted cybernetic enhancements thrummed with diabolical power. Harry gasped in horror and recognition. It was super mecha Hitler. Francis jumped at him and kicked him in the face at 99 miles per hour, sending him flying across the city. Hitler flew back towards him with potency and threw a punch at the pope. The Pope punched him back and their fists collided together sending shock-waves across the continent shattering windows and knocking over the Eiffel Tower.

"Enough of this." Francis calmly stated as the threw up his arms and sent a beam of pure holy light all over Hitler's face sending him back into the portal from whence he came. Francis then closed the portal to hell with a snap of his fingers.

"How did you do that?" Harry asked, amazed. He never saw the slap coming.

"I'm the pope, _BITCH_." Francis said as he rose up to the heavens, leaving Harry, Cho, and Colin alone in the Vatican.

"Team, do you read me?" Harpsichord was shouting in his headset. "We're all safe, Snake." Cho told them as they boarded the chopper.

"And that, gentlemen, is how to properly conduct a mission." Lupin gestured as he lit a cigarette. It was soaking wet and dripping wet from the rain. "Always follow the essence of PEE to a tee. Never deviate from the plan."

"Are we all prepared?"

"Textbook operation, fellas. You did it by the book. Perfect." Lupin said over the intercom. "Drinks and a round of cigars for everyone when you return."


	19. Chapter 19

Open plains soared ahead of Harry and Snape as they galloped across the land, thunderhead looming high above them. Harry knew for sure the horses were going to die if they rode them this hard much longer but it was imperative that they deliver their message on time.

The butternut brown trousers and confederate gray tunic he wore were soaking wet from the rain as Harry and Snape rode up on the sentry, who waved them through with a wave from his cap, and with a wave the sentry waved at the two of them as he waved them through into a clearing where several men in confederate blue were doing early morning soldier things, but wet because it was raining. Harry's trousers and confederate gray tunic were soaking wet because it was raining. He slid from the saddle in a smooth motion, tucking the scroll case behind him and wringing his confederate brown hat out in front of him. Snape also did the same and as the two dismounted their horses died in unison and slid into matching, pre-dug graves with little splashes.

"Gentlemen!" said an aide, shouting to be heard over the torrent. "The general is expecting you! Right this way." he yelled, and gestured over his shoulder in a come-with-me gesture that they should follow him where he would lead them. The aide continued "We've been lookin' for you folks for about an hour now, seems you barely beat the storm in - and the dawn." That much was true - the pair had arrived just in the nick of time and the storm was coming down hard.

At the mouth of a large tent, they were met with coffee made from ground chicory roots - no cream or sugar this close to the front line - by another aide, who gestured them into the tent. General Robert E. Lee looked up from where he was writing a dispatch and nodded at them to take a seat in the little folding chairs while he finished writing the dispatch. He stood, and stroked his stately, white beard for a moment before he turned to the aide and said " Thank you Tyson that will be all." and gestured for the aide to leave with a get-out-of-here gesture indicating he should go. The aide looked doubtful, but General Lee shook his stately white head insistently and said "I trust these gentlemen implicitly, Tyson, depend upon it. You may leave us." and Tyson the aide nodded and left.

Snape rose to shake the general's hand and the three of them shook hands like stately gentlemen before General Lee raised a stately eyebrow and said "Now, to ensure some privacy..." and he pulled out his wand and cast a silencing charm on the tent entrance. "Alohamora" he intoned with his trademark Southern Virginia accent. Then he turned to Snape and Harry, who were dressed in ragtag confederate uniforms, and asked them "What news from Dumbledore's army?"

Harry offered Lee the scroll case which held dispatched from Lupin in it detailing his mission. They conveyed the urgency of his mission and that Harry be aided in arrived New York City with all urgency, as the fate of the world hung in the balance. "These implore me, Mister Potter, that you be aided in arrive New York City by any means possible. I cannot jeopardize operations on the border of the wilderness without blowing my cover - and yet times such as these call for desperate measures." Harry and Snape had a curious appearance.

General Lee looked pensive, and withdrew behind his desk where he unrolled a map of the wilderness, lines and estimates drawn upon it indicating where things would happen and men, minne balls and blood would be senselessly wasted. There were several rail lines marked on the map, most of them with big red ecks marks through them indicating that the Union had sabotaged them, or the Confederacy had likewise sabotaged the rails before they could be seized and used by the Union.

"Here" said Lee, gesturing at nowhere in particular on the map, "We shall make our stand, and it here, by the grace of god and my home state of Virginia, we shall enable you to break through enemy lines and make your way through Washington and from there, undercover into New York by rail."

Harry nodded decidously, in affirmation of the fact that he believe he roughly understood what General Lee, one of the greatest Aurors to ever lived, had planned. But the General was not easily impressed. "But, first, gentlemen, I think I would appreciate an explanation of how you got here."

Harry began to explain.

In the early morning fog of Normandy's beaches as the smoke filtered overhead, it rained hard and Harry's antiquated great war era trench coat was dripping wet from the rain. He lit another cigarette and put it in his mouth with the other three as the silence built, no noise except the breathing of his fellow lander-mates, crash of the surf, the crash of the artillery,anti-air guns, the lark still bravely singing scarce heard amidst the roar of the aeroplanes and the small arms and machine gun fire from the beach. But otherwise no sound except pattering sand. Harry drank in the terrible silen-

General Lee waved impatiently.

Harry drank in the terrible silence, landed, fought his way past some nazis, commandeered a jeep and stole a dead SS colonel's uniform, drove down the road ahead of the invasion, fought some more nazis, then arrived at a secret airfield.

General Lee held up his hand, palm outwards, in a slow-down-what-are-you-saying gesture and said "Wait, what? Secret Nazi Airfield?"

"Yes" said Harry, his glasses steaming "A secret nazi airfield." he said with the sort of reverence one normally says "Surprise Christmas party." And it was indeed just that. Captain America, another famous auror, was fighting a secret wing of Dumbledore's army codenamed "MANY HEADED SNAKE CREATURE" alongside some nazis who had discovered the deception; but it was too late; many planes armed with city destroying PIGMUFFUINS were being launched. Logically, Harry decided it would be best to leave the cleanup to Captain America and the rest of the nazis, so he grabbed the plane to new york.

The great bomber with the PEEGMOOFIN was no B-52 like the Germans used during the war however, it was a B-5552, and was unequipped with secret self-defensive mechanisms that caused it to deliberately steer itself into a flotilla of Japanese Zeroes and Gundams.

Lee only stopped to ask what a Gundam was. The answer did not appear to satisfy him, but he said "Pray continue" and so Harry did.

Harry fought a sword and gun duel of whirling death atop the B-55552, holding a lithe gray mauser in one hand, a cigarette in the other and a katana in the third. He whirled and slashed, and the bad guy samurai in a big goofy mask with red pom-poms sneered decidously under his mask and kicked harry off the plane. He looked over the edge of the plane where he had kicked Harry off but saw only the ground far below because Harry was holding onto the sword handle grip thing of the katana he had stuck into the underside off the b-52 secretly unbeknownst to the samurai. Then he turned his back and Harry hauled himself back up on the plane. The samurai heard the faint scraping noise and made a "tch" noise of disbelief before he turned, and adopted a dual stance yet again. Harry raised his Katana in both hands, took another draw on his cigarette, and dive-rolled forward at the same time the Samurai leapt and slashed horizontally. There were two strokes with one moment, two strokes in one thought, cherry blossoms fall in the springtime, and when the bright flash faded, the samurai paused, gasped with disbelief, the slowly his upper torso slid off his lower torso and he fell away from the plane in a spray of viscera. Harry wiped the blood off his katana in one smooth motion and sheathed it inside his leg (Dr. Reed had always wanted to store a Katana inside her leg) and bowed for a moment in respect for his fallen enemy before before blowing the scattered cherry blossom petals away and looting his corpse.

General Lee nodded at the necessity of war. His own confederate troops were woefully under equipped and many only had shoes because they looted them from the dead or scavenged the leather from saddles or the like.

Harry knew he was running out of time so he ran to the flight deck and hot-wired the plane and aimed it roughly at North America, confident the US postal system would bring it down, then he ran to the escape pods. But the airlock was sealed shut. "AI DOOR" Harry yelled on the intercoms, but the door remained shut. Harry opened his multitool, screwdrivered a panel open and cut and pulsed random wires until the door's hydraulic clamps had engaged and disengaged, he received a mildly lethal electrical shock, but then finally the door sprung open. Harry leapt into the escape pod in the nick of time, but then Dobby sprung out of the shadows with a cloaking device holding a shock baton! "Harry potter must not go to New York, or he will be in mortal danger!" the house elf shrieked, and he tazed Harry unconscious.


	20. Chapter 20

He awoke in a dark and shady basement, the ceiling lamp's conical shade focusing the dim light of the sixty watt bulb onto Harry and not the room, whose walls were covered in old posters and cutting tools. There was a faint buzzing, as of flies writhing around rotting meat, and a stinking buzzing sound coming from a table out of the light. Harry spat the gag out of his mouth, the cloying yet sweet taste of gasoline on his tongue.

Dobby stepped out of the shadows in his woman suit and spread his arms to display the whole thing, genitalia tucked out of view between his tiny little elf legs. He spun in a circle so Harry could get a good look. Harry sighed exasperatedly and murmured "hut!" at sub audible levels, and he felt a little kick in the head and a small headache began as his skull gun kicked off: A tiny flap of skin on Harry's forehead blew off and a ribbon of blood ran down the side of Harry's face, but the effect was more obvious on Dobby, who was hit with a spread of crippler rounds on shotgun burst pattern. Dobby's torso was reduced to a cavernous red ruin and errant bits of flesh went flying like geese for the winter. He collapsed with an "aw..." noise. Harry engaged his wings, which expanded to their full twentyeight foot span and destroyed the chair he was tied to. He retracted them and stood up, deployed his subdermal glass knives to cut his bonds, and then clicked on his darkvision and located a set of stairs leading up to the surface.

The warm air of the summer night out in the big easy washed over Harry like an old familiar friend and he lit a cigarette as he strolled across the New Orleans streets whistling a jaunty tune. His augments compensated for his slight tone-deafness by auto-tuning. He stopped at a cafe and had fish in a white sauce with a little wine, and then he headed for the cemetery. On his way there he spotted a group of punks who had nothing better to do than hang out in the middle of the night, and he walked up as they laughed at him and said "You. Give me your clothes." They had seen enough cyberpunk movies to know where this was going and complied promptly. Harry thanked them and wrote them a cheque to reimburse them, dressed and was on his way again.

Of course, that night it was Carnivale and Harry was swept into a parade of floats that floated down the streets in a parade. Harry enjoyed himself while keeping an eye on the crowd for suspicious folk: then he saw him. Draco Malfoy, agent of Dumbledore's army. He was dripping wet from the rain, his long, ash blonde locks flowing around his well built and manly clavicle. He was wearing a two-piece suit with blue diamond cufflinks and fancy shoes, and Harry swallowed hard to control his sudden and completely unexplainable desire.

Moving like a drunken crab, Harry weaved through the crowd hoping to conceal himself, or at least his erection, but it was not to be as Draco noticed him and took off his sunglasses. He made a "You're mine." gesture and began to close in - Harry started elbowing his way through the press of the crowd, confetti flying. He spotted at least two flunkies closing in on him with batons. He considered using fragmentation grenades but then remembered he was in a parade full of people, so if they got close he's just have to make their batons rouge.

A large float depicting a giant gecko in coitus with a giant cake drifted close and Harry ducked under it, coming out the other side a moment later - they had lost line of sight and were searching the crowd, he knew, but it was only a matter of time. Harry leapt inside a hot-dog cart and yanked the man serving at it inside, and a moment later emerged in a hot-dog suit - totally inconspicuous. A fat man in a football jersey came up and said "Hey, man. Gimmie two cheeseburgers."

"We're closed." Harry snarled with as much dignity as someone dressed as a giant hotdog can mustard. "And who the hell are you supposed to be, anyways?" he added, remembering that he was an antihero and he needed to karmically balance himself for not using grenades in a crowd.

"There are some..." said the man "Who call me Coach."

Harry blinked.

Coach hit him in the face with a two by four and grabbed the hotdog cart, lifted it over his head and began to run away with it through the crowd. "Mother FUCKER!" Harry spat, wiping the blood from his lip as he rose to his feet. The crowd pulled back from him as he started to chase Coach, who had his Hotdog cart. Meanwhile, Draco and Flunkies had noticed the commotion and began to chase Harry.

Coach vaulted down the street with incredible grace characteristic of fat men who dance; floating like he had Baron Harkonnen's anti-gravity implants. This was possibly the case. He vaulted from the top of a car to the top of a truck and made his way along the rooftops of the downtown. Harry snorted, irritated, and fired his grappling hook up the side of the building and zoomed up past several windows. Draco leapt up the side of the building scaling it by hand, leaving his baton wielding flunkies to fend for themselves on the mean streets. Someone immediately stole their batons. They also lost their weapons.

Coach flew across an intersection, soaring above the city street to the next row of buildings, cart clutched triumphantly above him like the Olympic flame at the Olympics. Harry fired his grappling hook and it hit the cart, pierced through, and dragged the unconscious hot dog vendor free from the cart. Harry wordlessly mouthed "Oh shit." as he and the vendor fell into the street and then under a bus.

Draco, meanwhile, jumped and rolled along the top of the bus before grabbing a fire escape and mantling up to continue pursuing Coach and the cart.

Harry awoke in the hospital, in a dimly lit room. The lights outside of his room flickered uneasily, like a special effect in a horror film. In bed next to him, the hot dog cart vendor groaned. Harry knew that groan. It was the groan of the undead. Harry flailed out of bed as the vendor reached for him, and grunted "Hut!" and his skullgun popped the vendor in the face, but he was a zombie and kept doing zombie stuff. Harry realized that fighting zombies in a hot dog costume was absurd and ducked into a closet to change into a Johnny shirt, before emerging with his subdermal glass knives fully extended. A swift cut and the hot dog cart vendor zombie was no more.

So then Harry stumbled out of his room into a hallway full of zombies, and then a lobby equally full of zombies, and then some other parts of a hospital that were again, quite equally full of zombies. In other words, there were a lot of zombies. Harry despaired. "What ever will I do about all these zombies?"

"Frankly, my dear" said coach, still holding the hot dog cart as he stood triumphantly in the doorway "I don't give a damn!" He tossed it aside casually and put an arm around Harry affectionately. "But If I was you, friend" he continued casually "I'd go to the cemetery."

Harry nodded decidously, and then the two ran out into the street where it was raining hard. The streets were lined with zombies, the whole population of the city was zombies. It was like a bad zombie movie. The two caught the bus going to the cemetery and entered a wrought iron gate adorned with skulls and crossbones. A large wrought iron sign declared in rusty letters that it was the "SKULL AND CROSSED BONES PIRATE CEMETARY" and the gate creaked as it opened.

At the top of the hill in the middle of the cemetery, an eerie green light was glowing, a diabolic firefly on amphetamines. Harry and Coach tiptoed up the hillside, where they found a fat woman in a big white and lime green robe sitting in front of a skull-shaped cauldron, the brew in the cauldron steaming and bubbling and glowing eerily, a diabolic firefly on amphetamines. Around them were woven baskets that probably contained poison snakes, and trees from which hung little shrunken heads and effigies that presumably represented ex-lovers. She gestured for them to join her in a come-stay-awhile-and-listen gesture, and Harry and Coach came forward and sat. There was a little squeak and Harry self conciously tucked the rubber chicken he sat on away.

"I sense..." she said, waving a baubled hand dramatically "You seek answers." Harry and Coach nodded. Harry thought introductions were in order, so he was about to ask "Who are you?" when she said "Wait! I sense you seek to know who I am!" she waved her arms dramatically and the cauldron flared. "I am Madame Dulche De Leche. That is all and all will be. And you," she said "You are the boy who lived - Le Boi ces't ne mort pas." Harry was mystified by his french sounding nickname the voodoo community must have given him - but there was no time for that. He wanted answers about the zombies, but before he could ask "what's up with all these zombies?" she cut him off. "Wait! I sense you seek to know the source of this great eeeeevil!" Arms waving dramatically, cauldron flared, cauldron bubbled. "Tis' a great voodoo curse, from the ghost pirate captain No-beard!"

Harry gasped. It all made sense. "SKULL AND CROSSED BONES PIRATE CEMETARY", zombies, voodoo, mysterious voodoo ladies. It all fit.

"The ghost pirate No-beard has had his grave deeefiled, and lain a curse over his descendant's land - so that all who walk upon it will rise as de undead!" she said, testing out the phonetic accent a little but ultimately concluding it was probably too politically incorrect to continue employing and would be difficult to apply consistently anyways.

"Wait!" she said, predicting what Harry was about to ask again. "How do you undefile the grave? You must return that which was stolen from it. Wait, save your questions...There is only one who can answer the question you are about to ask...NO-BEARD!" she wailed, waved her arms, and there was a flash of green light from the cauldron and she and her various voodoo paraphernalia disappeared. Looming over them, the wrought iron gate of the central, towering marble mausoleum swung open with an iron creaking noise. Frightened, yet excited, Harry and Coach rose and tiptoed forward, over the lintel and into the mausoleum itself. Inside, they found empty coffins, and a spiraling staircase leading into a cavern. Harry lit a torch because Coach couldn't see in the dark, and the two descending the dripping and spooky stairs into the darkness.

Moisture clung to the walls of the cavern, a groaning wind winding it's way through the complex as Harry and Coach descended into what Harry realized was a secret pirate cave. There, hidden under the tall cliffs of New Orleans, was a secret pirate cove with a vast, ruined ship half sunk in the center. A crude, rotted dockworks was assembled about it, and torches lit the cave with an eerie blue glow; the supernatural was afoot.

It was there, looking over the lip of the cliff overlooking the cove, that Harry first heard the eerie fiddle music wafting from the deck. He looked, and he saw there, on the deck, skeletons dancing to an infernal shanty, bound in torment to haunt the seas. Harry invoked the star of david, a famous christian symbol, in front of him as a warding gesture, swallowed his fear, and descended down the rotting docks towards the ship.

At the gangplank, a ghostly face in an eyepatch with giant muttonchops, blue and semi-transparent, confronted him. "Avast!" it said. "Who be ye and why do ye trespass upon CAPTAIN NO-BEARD'S SSSSACRED BURIAL GROUND!?" Ghostly saliva flew.

Quavering, Harry replied "I am Harry Potter."

The ghost blinked. "Really?" he asked suspiciously.

Harry nodded. "Hold on." said the ghost. He left for a moment. He came back holding a ghostly blue lantern accompanied by another ghost pirate, this one with a ghostly wooden nose and interesting tattoos on his forehead. "Ye don't look like him." the pirate said, squinting and holding the lantern up.

Harry shrugged.

The two ghosts conferred for a moment, shooting backwards, suspicious glances at him from the ship. There was some ghostly whispering, and then a consensus appeared to be reached. "All right." said the bemuttonchopped ghost, "But no funny stuff, ye hear?"

"Hear ye! Hear ye!" the ghost said, as Harry moved up onto the deck. "Captain No-Beard is now holdin' piratical court, ye hear? So wattle yer jibs, ye mainsail flacking scitheroons, or I'll tie ye belowdecks to yer abovedecks and swab the lot through." And indeed. At the top of the fo'castle stood an imposing, shaven pirate ghost captain wearing an admiral's hat and a seafaring captain jacket of imposing stature. Most of the crew appeared to be wedged into some sort of makeshift jury box, though there were a set of stands that a defendant, a prosecution, and a witness could stand at, various nailed up around the deck. Harry realized that not being a pirate lawyer he was at a serious disadvantage in this element, so he cut the red tape. "No-beard!" he said tremulously "I have come to ask how I can end the curse lain upon New Orleans!" The jury howled with protest, but No-Beard only smiled the smile of an ancient sea devil. His laugh was as cold and fathomless as the bottom of the ocean, booming like waves as it washed over Harry. "Ha ha ha ha" he laughed.

"You want to end the curse?" He scoffed. "You look more like a flooring inspector."

Harry persevered. "Really!"

No-Beard contemplated this for a moment, stroking his white, patriarchal beard for a moment. "I'll tell ye. For generations my greatest prize was my pair of matched blue diamond cufflinks. Took em' from a Spanish captain who had more gold than sense, for a start." he chuckled. "One of my favorite possessions by way of theft, that was."

Harry asked "All I need to do is find and return the cufflinks?"

"Aye," replied captain No-Beard "But it's not as simple as ye ken." He waved, and a ghostly image floated in the air of the New Orleans Carnivale parade, and in the center stood Draco Malfoy. He was wearing the cufflinks.

Harry swallowed.

Hastily, Harry beat a retreat, setting out on a hopeless quest to retrieve Captain No-Beard's stolen treasure. He sat down on a tombstone outside of the mausoleum to contemplate existence. How could he retrieve it? It seemed hopeless, but then Harry thought of a plan. "C'mon, Coach." Harry said, making a come-follow-me-where-I-am-going gesture as he slid off the tombstone. "I have a plan." And he did.

The two set out across town stealthy like, avoiding the many zombies and zombie-like creature who roamed the street in the rain, as rain ran down the streets and into the drains. Harry and Coach arrived at a costume shop and Harry rummaged around in the front while Coach headed into the back. Harry picked out a set of bolts, and some fake stitches, and he applied them to himself. He paused in front of a mirror and flexed with his shirt off. He was a handsome cyborg zombie dressed in a hospital johnny shirt.

Harry left the costume shop and slipped back into the parade, which was still going. Amidst the confetti and floats Harry found no sign of Draco. However, he did spot a pair of baton-less baton wielding flunkies enjoying a nice bouquet of cotton candy, and so Harry snuck up on them and stapled a tracking device to the back of their head, completely undetected. Then he slunk away like a cat but in the form of a cyborg zombie.

He slipped away to an abandoned building and brought out his laptop computer, which he flipped open. He watched the progress of the flunkies via GPS satellite, though the signal was weak because of the rain. He saw the bright red blip travel across the screen which showed a representational map of New Orleans on it's screen. The blip stopped at the Yukon Hotel.

Harry closed the laptop with a snap as if closing a briefcase and tucked it back into his leg (the other leg, not the one with the sword in it because there wasn't room.) Making a mental note to himself where they were located, Harry reached the ground floor fo the abandoned building and went out the front door, hailing a cab. He jumped into the back of the first one to pull up and immediately opened his laptop to keep an eye on the GPS. He was apparently sharing a cab with some red-haired woman wearing nothing but bandages, but he was too busy watching the screen to pay much attention to the shouted conversation about explosions that the cabbie and his passenger appeared to be having. He left a five dollar bill on his seat and rolled out of the taxi as they neared his destination.

The Yukon Hotel was obvious because it had a big sign saying "Yukon Hotel" on the side of it in big yellow letters. The rain poured down atmospherically as Harry scaled the side of the adjoining building, binoculars in one hand and rubber chicken in the other. Not having any hands free, Harry was forced to climb with his teeth. Biting up the side of the building, Harry eventually stopped at an abandoned artist's studio apartment. He slid inside, the streetlights creating a massive shadow of a backlit fan on the back of the studio wall. Harry took out his binoculars and studied the hotel. There, in room 214, Draco was standing at the window, gazing into the street. He unbuttoned his collar. Harry did the same. He began to take his suit off, first the jacket, then the shirt. Harry's adams apples bobbed up and down like the dongly bit on an oil derrick and Draco casually threw aside his shirt and stood at the window, his beautifully sculpted masculine chest shining in the light of the hotel room. Draco turned away from the window and the light of his hotel room went off.

Harry shivered with feelings entirely unrelated to the cold from the rain, and slipped onto the fire escape. He leveled his grappling crossbow at the hotel and fired, a long cable snaking out across the way. It found purchase almost silently above Draco's window, biting into the concrete with subtle power. Harry secured the end on his side, and then slipped the rubber chicken around the cable, holding onto either end, and he slid across the street, legs up and aimed at Draco's window.

He smashed through the window with a shattering glass sound completely silent and rolled across the room's floor. Then he sat crouched in the darkness, for a heartbeat, two heartbeats, before he swiftly and silently rolled into the bathroom. A minute later, he cautiously stuck his head out. Nothing. The room was dark, and quiet except for the quiet sound of Draco sleeping. Harry snuck like a crab across the room floor towards Draco's clothing.

The lamp snapped on. Draco sat up in bed cross legged, one hand on the lamp and the other holding up a shiny blue steel revolver leveled at Harry. "Potter." he spat with venom. "Don't you know it's not done to sneak into a gentleman's bedroom?"

Harry gasped, caught totally unawares. Draco gestured with the gun. "Into the bathroom with you while I get dressed." Harry turn and walked into the bathroom, Draco slid out of bed and closed the bathroom door. Harry's mind raced, trying to think of some sort of escape plan as Draco got into his clothing, but alas, he was not fast enough. Draco opened the door and gestured for Harry to move out into the hallway. At gunpoint, Harry was led out of the room and they were joined by two baton wielding baton wielders. They moved down the stairwell into the car park.

In the underground garage (it's pronounced differently in England, look it up.) Draco had Harry sink to his knees. "Well, Potter." said Draco. "Looks like you failed." he smiled smugly. Harry only scowled. "Malfoy, you so smug. You wouldn't be if you knew you'd been fooled. Those are cubic zirconium cufflinks you're wearing." Draco's minions snickered and Draco looked horrified and affronted. He flicked his cufflinks at Harry's face but they bounced off harmlessly because Harry's face was made of an alloy so hard it was impervious to diamonds. Draco shot Harry in the head.

He blacked out, and awoke, moaning, in a pool of his own cyborg blood. He rolled onto his back, his vision clouded by black clouds and aura threatening his consciousness, and felt desperately around for the cufflinks. His fingers found what they were looking for and he tucked the cufflinks away. Then he activated his emergency beacon and blacked out again.


	21. Chapter 21

He awoke with a tube down his nose and throat, brown fluid oozing out. He was in full traction, the weight of his injuries on him. Standing over his bedside was Snape holding a clipboard. "Well, Potter" Snape oozed casually "Looks like you really did a number on yourself." Harry moaned. "It was..it was Draco.."

"A likely story, Potter." Snape oozed casually "Blame your failures on Dumbledore's army, why don't you?" he oozed casually. Then, Snape reflected "Buuuuut of course, you diiiiiiid succeed in finding the cufflinks, so it's not as if you completely wasted everyone's time." He held up the cufflinks.

Harry coughed blood through his tube. "You must return them to Captain No-Beard."

Snape sighed casually. "Very well, Potter. I will depart at once while Madame Pomfrey heals your many grievous injuries and wounds. But do not depart until such a time as I, Severus Snape, have returned."

Harry slid back into the blissful sea of unconscious dreaming. In his dream, he was walking through a dark place. Ahead, there was an iron lamp post, but as he came closer it slid further away. He moved faster and faster to get to it, but it slid further and further away. It was almost out of sight, when a hot breath at his shoulder made him realize he wasn't alone. "You can do it, Harry." a giant lion mumbled. It handed him a flashlight it was holding in it's mouth, which Harry took, nonplussed. He shone the flashlight ahead of him and the path was made clear. The lamp post grew closer, as Harry and the Lion walked down the path together. Finally, the climbed up a small grassy hill and above them the sky shone with many stars. Standing at the foot of the very tall iron lamppost, Harry felt safer than he had for a long time. He looked at the lion.

"Thank you for helping me. who are you?" he asked.

The lion smiled wisely. "Aslan." it said extending a paw. "Aslan Wake."

Harry shook hands with the lion and woke up feeling refreshed. Snape came into the room. "It is done!"he announced. "The voodoo over New Orleans is no more. Captain No-Beard wanted me to give this to you." And Snapple handed Harry a scroll case. Harry peaked inside. "A message for General Lee!" Harry exclaimed excitedly. "We need to deliver it to him." Snape looked alarmed. "But we'll never make it in time!" he moaned casually.

Harry raised one eyebrow. "Not on foot, we won't." He extended his wings. "I have a plan."

"All right, all right." said General Lee. "We're out of time. Your story will have to wait until later."

"But I was just getting to the best part." Harry complained. General Lee tucked his wand into his holster beneath his coat and gestured for Harry and Snape to get out of his tent. "We have precious little time, Gentlemen." he stated "And I must prepare for the coming battle. Rigsby!" he yelled, and an aide ushered himself into the tent, leaving Harry and Snape no choice but to leave.

As Harry left the tent, he gazed up at the moon. The moon made him think of Luna Lovegood, ace Data Angel of the Order, and he flashed back to when he first met her.

Harry watched the fluorescent lights of the secret base whizz by the elevator with little whizzing noises that fluorescent lights make when they woosh past with a whizzing noise. His cybernetic augmentation began automatically counting the number to floors he was underground. The elevator landed with a polite clang and opened into a room covered in computer monitors and parts and in the center was a egg shape chair hang from the ceiling with a girl in it.

The egg shape chair swivel to turn and Harry saw a pale woman with dark hair arranged in a spaghetti mess of cables, some linked straight into her neck. She wore a neutral expression as opposed to a good expression or even an evil expression, and in fact it was rather like she wore no expression at all, only an electronic visor that obscured her face and made interpersonal communication feel less personal, rather like sunglasses.

"Harry Potter" she said. "I am Luna, and I am mission control at the Order."

"I heard about you." said Harry. "They say you are the greatest hacker who was ever borned. They say you have hacked the gibbon. That you ran the Beijing job datapacket multicluster in under twelve parsecs, with no ping. They say you've killed a man for walking the wrong side of the line. That you shot a man in the city-state of New Reno, just to watch him die."

Luna nodded, the mass of cables rising and falling in the background almost organically in sync with her movement. Despite his many years of training and cool exterior, he felt himself almost intimidated by the alienists of the human in front of him.

"Yes." she said matter of factly. "I did."

The two regarded each other for a moment, before Luna turned away to face the many computer monitors in the room again, sending bus ports and ship ports and plane ports flying as she did so to regard the streaming data as it datalinked across the many output viewports.

Harry stepped back in to the elevator where Snape was waiting. "Scary, isn't it?" asked Snape. "We found her burnt out in a Taiwanese electronics market eating cockroaches under a mattress and reformatting thumb-drives with falsified storage amounts. They say she's so wired up she's part human now, not fully machine..." Snape trailed off, gazing at Harry's metallic chest plate. Harry stared at Snape hard with hatred. He wished he was not talking to Snape and was outside in the rain above the surface because he felt claustrophobic because it was underground and he felt trapped inside his own metal skin.

Harry noticed the men stationed at the lines. He knew, from his experience as a rifleman during the war of 1812, that they were preparing to attack. Harry was an expert of strategy, being promoted from rifleman to general on his first day, mainly because he killed everyone else who was a higher rank. He knew that if they employed a gorilla pincer ambush double team drone strike that they could easily bust through the Union's lines, no matter how many men they had.

Snape lit a cigarette. The rain of the night made sizzling noises as it poured down upon the two men and immediately extinguished the cigarette. Snape sighed and took out his wand, which doubled as an umbrella, out of his solid black trenchcoat which was dripping wet from the rain and used it to shelter himself from the rain. Snape relit his cigareee, and Harry mumbled that Snape wasn't letting him stand under the wandbrella too.

General Lee walked out of his hangar in his magnificent general's mech suit, flanked by two aides who were in slightly smaller yet mech suits. While Lee was in a full humanoid robot suit, the aids were basically in what looked like giant 7 feet metal chicken legs with a platform at the top with controls and a mounted machine laser gun. Harry approached Lee, whose mech suit was soaking wet and dripping with rainwater from the rain, and said "General Lee! I have to get to New York! What's the plan?"

"Mr. Potter, have no fear," Lee said confidently. "I have a sound plan with which to defeat the union. Though the union's cavalry boast fine repeating rifles that will surely harry my men, within the woods the advantage is slimmer. We shall employ stealth, cunning, loyalty, and the power of my home state of Virginia, god bless it. By the will of our fine people, we shall procure victory. Now, do excuse me, Mr. Potter. I must address the troops."

Harry was familiar with this style of assault, as he had employed it almost every time when he fought against the Anglo-Saxons. He confidently stood to the side as the General steered his robot suit to stand atop a large bandstand. Great speakers amplified his voice, which boomed across the plains.

General Lee stepped forward to address his men. "LISTEN HERE YOU SCUMBAGS!" He shouted authoritatively. "TODAY WE FIGHT NOT FOR OUR OWN LIVES, BUT WE FIGHT FOR SOMETHING GREATER! WE ARE ALL HERE TODAY TO FIGHT FOR SOMETHING GREATER! WE HAVE TO FIGHT! FORE A MORE PERFECT UNION! FOR A MORE PERFECT SOCIETY! FOR A MORE PERFECT WORLD! FOR THE PEOPLE OF VIRGINIA! FOR THE PEOPLE OF THE SOUTH! FOR OUR FINE CONFEDERACY!" The crowd cheered at this, Lee fired explosives into the air to signal that he was not finished. "I SEE THE ENEMY HAS EMPLOYED THE HELP OF ELEPHANTS! BUT TONIGHT WE WILL FEAST ON ELEPHANT PIE!" The crowd roared with excitement, Lee fired explosives into the air to signal that he was not finished. "AT THE END OF OUR HOPE! AT THE END OF OUR TIME! THEY MAKE TAKE OUR LIVES, BUT THEY WILL NEVER TAKE OUR INDEPENDANCE!" The crowd cheered and roared and high fived each other and all lit a pre-battle cigarette in the rain.

Harry had never seen such a sight as this since Woodstock. All the specks of flame in the cigarettes were as firefly's in the clear moonlight. Harry reminisced of the night he spent in the meadow with Ginny with the fireflies. How romantic it was, he remembered, that night they had run away together, that night when he had killed both of their parents because he loved her and wished to marry her, but they were both promised to another. Harry trembled at the thought of what he had said to her on that night-

Harry snapped back to reality as a squadron of CF-18 fighter jets flew overhead to signal the commencement of the assault. A moment after the jets passed, there was a flurry of explosions as key Union front line positions were neutralized by the ordinance dropped by the fighters. Then, before the explosion had a chance to disperse into smoke, the artillery guns fired upon more Union lines. As soon as those guns fired, captain from the center line fired a green flare into the air with his flare gun, signaling the charge.

The soldiers roared as they ran forward, firing their weapons, throwing grenades and smoking cigarettes. Harry looked on in awe from the balcony of Lee's ten-story command center field base tent. General Lee walked out onto the balcony with Harry, observing the charge below and ahead of them. Harry noticed the Lee was no longer in his mech suit.

"Astounding, isn't it? Three hundred million men strong, all fighting for a cause they do not understand, yet they still fight. It is amazing what human spirit can overcome. Some men call it ignorance, but I am more humble than them. I call it perseverance: Resolve. Seeing something through to the end, and seeing it done yourself. You understand that, don't you, Harry?" Harry nodded. He knew what it meant to fight for a higher cause. General Lee lit his pipe.

General Lee walked back inside from the balcony into the tent. Harry followed him to his own private hangar/mech launch pad. "This mission is suicide, you know that, Harry?" Harry nodded again. "My men will never make it, but I hope you do. This is all for you and your Order, Harry." Harry gasped at the mention of the Order. "But I thought it was a secret order!" Harry screamed.

General Lee smiled and displayed his label pin to Harry. It contained the secret symbol of the Order. A triangle with an eye in the centre. Harry gasped. "The Order runs far deeper than what you may ever know, Harry, but know this. You may doubt the order, but they are doing what is right for humanity." Harry nodded. An explosion shook the command tent. Harry and General Lee looked over to the command screen to see that the Union had organized and were returning fire with their own artillery.

"Well, I suppose I should stop stalling and go." Lee smiled. Harry lit a cigarette as Lee stepped into his mech. The countdown began, and as it hit zero, the mech launched into the sky and flew towards the carnage of the battle.

In the blur of battle, amidst the smoke and ruination that mankind wrought upon itself, Harry raced, barefoot, desperate, towards a hole in the union line. Minne balls and blue turtle shells zoomed overhead, scoring deep troughs in the earth, and deep red wounds in the soldiers around Harry. Men screamed, fought and died in the filth and mud as they mounted a desperate bayonetta charge.

One moment, Harry was running full tilt like a goose out of hell, the next instant flat on his ass in the mud, a gaping chest wound on his chest. He briefly lost consciousness again.

He still felt the dull thump of the artillery in his dreams, heard voices whispering in the background as if far away. He was surrounded by gray fog. There was a light ahead of him, and by the feel of the wall, he was in a long train tunnel. Smooth, rough wet brickwork lined the tunnel, and he could feel cold rails at his feet. He gazed down, and though it was too dark to see, he felt his hands. Felt his pulse.

What he did not feel, however, was metal.

He didn't dare breathe. The augments were gone. His wings, gone. His optic retinal laser beams, gone, his subdermal knives, gone, his apple-peeler, gone, his leg katana sheathe, gone, his candy-maker...gone. As if in a dream, he stumbled down the tunnel towards the light. He realized, as the light grew closer, his hands were too small. He was too close to the ground. With what Alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity, Harry realized he was in his eleven year old body, untouched by cybernetic enhancements. He stepped foward, towards the light. One more step, Harry thought. One more step...

A hot, warm breath landed on the back of his neck. "Harry." Aslan purred. "Not yet." And he was lifted by the back of his neck, and dragged gently away from the light. He saw it draw further away, his feet rhythmically bumping against the train track, his vision growing dim. His arms grew heavy. His eyelids drooped, and eventually, blackness overcame him.

Gently, he awoke. Someone was pouring water on his face. He blinked and sputtered and coughed. A young looking confederate private slapped him gently. "This one made it, Johnny." he yelled over his shoulder. Harry was seated on a cot in a muddy trench, wearing a muddy trench coat. He frantically checked himself, and discovered the scroll case tucked securely away in his pants. The young private walked crablike in a crouch to a bunsen burner that had a coffee machine over it. Harry lit up a cigarette as the Private brewed coffee. "Name's May." he said. "James May. Fifth infantry. Who are you?" Harry quickly searched his mind, but found nothing.

"Uhm...Adahn." he made up on the spot. May nodded. "Plenty of folks who don't go around using real names here, Adahn." Just then, a man with a thin beard, also in a ragged confederate uniform, staggered in from further up the trench.

"This one make it, May?" he asked, wiping blood on his tunic.

May nodded. "Yes, Johnny. Says is' name is Adahn."

"A-what?" said Johnny. "Listen, mister, I don't care for your games." the man continued "But I'm in a jam and I reckon' you're my ticket out of this mess." Harry regarded him coolly. "You gonna help me and May here break out of the main fighting and sneak into the wilderness."

Harry only nodded, stood. The two confederates grabbed their supplies hastily, and prepared to exit the trench. Johnny offered Harry his cupped hands to boost him out of the trench, but Harry employed his wings, smashed May out of the way and hurled himself into the air, where he was promptly shot by union surface to air missiles. Harry weaved and rolled and did a barrel roll to avoid the missiles, before making a perfect one point landing.

True to his word, he knelt and hauled up Johnny and then May. He noticed, as he hauled the young man up, how light he was, how this around the face. With childlike features, it was clear May was a victim of malnutrition. The lead cartridges began to fly as a group of cavalry with repeater rifles opened fire at them, and the landscape was quickly marked with numerous injuries. Harry, May and Johnny made hell for leather to the tree line, where they crouched behind a falling hog and watched the battle progress.

The initial thrust of the boys in gray was confident, true, but the Union boasted of superior numbers, and equipment besides. When Harry had first set out, things had seemed confident, but while he was unconscious, the tide had turned and now Union Artillery was hammering at the Confederates Warhound Mecca Platoon, and there was no sign of the air support save some smoke trails from burning wrecks. As Harry gazed on, he saw General Lee's mecha fall. He gasped with horror. May moaned with despair.

He was tapped on the shoulder. Lee shouldered off his invisibility cloak, and smiled wisely. "Diversion, Harry. Things have not, alas, gone as planned. It is good that war is so terrible, or else we would grow fond of it, is it not?" He asked, while waving his wand. "Now stand close, Harry."

The four huddled close in the woods, and watched somewhat incredulously as a bright purple bus approached the woods. Bullets zoomed around it, Artillery almost missed, and it was as if nobody even noticed the bus existed. "My secret weapon." Lee boasted. "Behold, Harry, the Knight Bus." It rumbled to halt in front of the stand of trees, and with a pneumatic hiss, the door slid open and a handsome man in full plate stepped down and beckoned them forward. "Lancelot." Lee tipped his hat as he stepped aboard. Harry gaped in amazement as he was ushed aboard. Lancelot. Galahad. Saladin. Hercules. All the knights of the round table, right out of Arthurian Legend. The knights of Camelot, on a bus.

"But...But how?" asked Harry.

Galahad obliged him with an explanation. "Camelot never fell, Harry. We just moved to Russia."

"Russia?" Harry asked incredulously.

"For the stability." Galahad explained. Up front, Lee was arguing with a shrunken head nailed to the dashboard. "Ey' me bredda! Won ton ya gota, dig me heed ya nevah butss?" Harry noticed that the little shrunken head looked a lot like rapper Little Jacob. Lee appeared to be arguing battle plans, which Harry had no patience for, as he was a foot soldier first. He never aspired to a post like General, as he did not wish to have the blood on his hands.

A consensus appeared to be reached and all the knights carefully prepared for battle as the bus lurched into action. It speed up, with Lee at the wheel, and they slammed in the dead center of the Union Column, sending men and cannons flying. Amidst the roar of battle, the knights leapt from the bus, swinging swords righteously. Harry, Johnny and May rand from the bus as Ninjas jumped out of the union lines at the knights, and battle was joined. A blurred ninja, moving incredibly fast, stabbed Johnny in the throat with a knife, and badly injured May before they escaped into the tree lines. Harry knelt over May. "Hey." Harry said, holding May's hand as he died. "Stay with me."

May looked up into Harry's eyes, and he realized, with his shirt ripped open and his hat askew, in his moment of vulnerability, that May was actually a woman. "Harry" she said "I hate you." and she died. Harry loved her.

He didn't have long to grieve. A Ninja landed on his back and wrapped her feet around his throat.

MEANWHILE, ON A BUS IN THE PLACE WHERE THE FIGHTING HAPPENS

Lee drew his saber and held it up in the dying light of the sun. "WE MAKE OUR FINAL STAND!"

Silhouetted against the sun, a dark figure laughed deeply. "No, Lee, today you die." And Abraham Lincoln stepped into the fray holding a silver ax. Ax and Sabre spun thru the air and clashed, sparks flying. "For Virginia!" Lee shouted bravely. "Who's Virginia?" asked Lincoln. The two smashed into each other, teeth bared, mustaches waving in the wind as they danced a furious dance of death. "Lee, you cannot win!" Abraham said. "I am a vampire hunter. What chance do you have?" But Lee only laughed. "Vampire hunter? Pah. You're nothing, sir, and I bite my thumb at you!"

Abraham spat. "How dare you?!"

Lee grinned, drew his wand and blasted Abraham Lincolns ax out of the air with a disarming charm. Abraham rapidly pulled a steak out and threw it at Lee, but he blasted it aside, and leapt upon a horse.

"We will fight again, Lee!" yelled Licoln furiously. "And when we do, I will finish you!"

"Whatever." Lee said. "You are stupid. I bid you good day."

Lincoln seethed at the icy burn.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH

Harry gasped as his air passage was cut off. He spun and jerked to dislodge the ninja, who spun away in a blur. He drew his subdermal knives and prepared to fight, but suddenly he noticed a needle sticking out of his buttock nipple. The world went black. Again.

"No." said Aslan. "I only do near death experiences. Not drugged unconsciousness states. You're on your own."

And Harry woke up. He was tied to a chair, and his augments were toggled off. In front of him, a ninja held a claw hammer in her foot. She had no arms. She hit him in the face with the hammer.

"I'll talk!" Harry yelled desperately.

"Good." she said, lowering her ninja mask with her other foot, and shook her head. "It was getting hard to breathe in there. She had green eyes and red hair and slightly odd shaped face. "Tell me about Dr. Frankenstein."

Harry gasped. This ninja knew too much. "I...it.." The ninja raised the hammer. "DR. FRANKY RUNS UNATCO AND WAS ONCE PART OF THE ORDER OF THE PHEONIX ALONGSIDE COLE PHELPS BUT THEY FELL OUT OVER THE POGWAFFLE AND NOW COLE IS DEAD AND DR FRANKENSTEIN IS WORKING ALONE TO STOP DIABLO WHO IS CONTROLLING DUMBLEORE FROM TAKING OVER THE WORLD!"

The ninja dropped the hammer and blinked at him, totally at a loss. "What?"

"Darn." thought Harry. "I might have said too much."

While she was distracted, he looked around the room and surmised he was inside a high school dorm room. There were white beds and windows overlooking a Japanese courtyard in the springtime. He could see a mural on one wall distantly that looked kinda weird and like it had themes to do with bodily wholeness, which he supposed was appropriate given that it appeared the school was for disabled teenagers, such as the Ninja before him. She extended a foot. "Tell me this is the truth. This is too outrageous to be a lie." She said.

Harry nodded,

"Well," she reasoned, "I can't work for the union any more. The civil war has been over for two hundred years. I guess we have to stop Diablo, huh. I'm Rin." she said calmly. "Who are you?"

"You kidnapped me and interrogated me and you don't know who I am." said Harry in a flat, disbelieving tone. "Were you interrogating people at random?"

"Yeah." Rin shrugged. "It took a while to find someone with good info." She kicked a closet to door, and it popped open and a mountain of corpses spilled out. Harry stared in horror. "Geeze." He said. "You keep it up, you're going to give me a heart condition."

Rin laughed. Harry wasn't sure if he loved her. Probably.


	22. Chapter 22

Harry and Rin began driving up the coast along the scenic routes, rushing to beat Dumbledore to New York. Rin steered with one foot and operated the pedals with the other while Harry absent misguidedly played with his cell phone. The rhythmic flash of the streetlights as they passed was hypnotic, lulling Harry into a state of drowse. He began nodding off, his head leaning forward, his eyelids struggling to stay aloft in the wake of the fatigue catching up to him.

"Look." Rin said softly. Ahead, the flashing red and blue lights of police spinners lit the snow. The NYPD, men in dark coats with badges on their chests, were securing a scene. Just off the road from a small roadside diner that was just off the road, Harry thought he glimpsed bodies. Curious, the two pulled over, parking their black sedan at the diner's little parking lot. As they got out, a woman in uniform came over to intercept them. "Move along, nothing to see here." she said in a soft yet authoritative tone. Harry flashed his Hogwarts ID and stepped neatly over the crime scene tape, followed by Rin. With an annoyed glance, the woman fell in behind them.

They made their way through the trampled down path to the site, where the NYPD had started to clear the snow around the bodies. Harry lit a cigarette, the details coming to him sharply. The scene, and the biting cold, served to waken him. The woman, whom Harry noticed was a police detective, spoke. "Got phoned in an hour ago by a drunk who came out of the diner to take a piss. No ID on the bodies – and the coroner hasn't arrived yet. The CID should be here any time now."

Harry scanned the scene with his augments, revealing an x-ray of the pair of bodies lying in the snow. He was reminded of snow angels. Grimly, he shook the thought away and considered the scene. Rin stared with a deadpan expression – like someone who had seen it all.

Another car pulled up, this one unmarked. Akane Renko, Chief Inspecting Detective for the NYPD, got out of the car and ran one hand through her brown regulation haircut. Harry turned to regard her and took in her narrow face, the dark circles around her eyes, making her look somewhat racoon-like against her pale face. She wore a long brown trench coat, and wore a strange black metal firearm at her hip.

She also lit a cigarette. "Who are you?" she asked.

Harry flashed his Hogwarts ID, but Akane lifted her gun out of its holster and casually pointed it at him. The gun lit up with little blue LEDs and a little hologram appeared on the handle. It wasn't oriented towards Harry, so he couldn't see what it said. He started to go into a kata mind duel stance, but then Akane said "Huhm." with satisfaction, and tucked the gun away. "What was that all about?" Harry asked.

"I'll tell you later. First, what are you doing here?" she asked.

"Well, I was curious about the scene. It's quite a site, isn't it? And in such a quiet part of town, too."

"And?"

Harry didn't bother replying. Instead, he walked forward, leaning over the bodies, bent down, and began digging them out with his hands. He knew that the CID would be wincing at his manhandling of the crime scene, but that she was powerless to stop him because he outranked her. He cracked open the frozen clothes on each body, searched the pockets, the linings, everything. Feeling around, Harry found an enormous exit wound at the top of the spine, and carefully extracted a slug from the wound. The other body matched. He stood up and stepped back, surveying his handiwork.

"Here." he said, throwing the slug to the CID. She caught it and glowered at Harry. "Never let it be said that Hogwarts denies the NYPD the benefits of its efforts."

"So what do you make of it, Harry?" Rin asked.

"The killer really wanted to conceal their identities." concluded Harry.

"You don't say?" said Akane. The trio turned to regard the scene. Both bodies sported bloody, frozen stumps at the neck and arms, their hands and heads completely gone. They had been laid like snow angels, spreadeagle on the snow, their bodies frisked and all identification removed. Harry would have to wait for the report from the coroner, but he was sure the gunshot wounds were inflicted to destroy the cortical stacks. The two people lying for goodness knows how long in the snow were Really Dead – their stacks destroyed, unable to be re-sleeved.

"We'll take your car back to the station." Harry said. Akane glowered, and Rin leaned over and smiled at her. "He's always like this." she confided. Akane gave her a doubtful look and the three got into Akane's car and drove into New York.

Harry drove the car, and Rin and Akane sat in the back. The buildings gradually grew taller as they came into the city. "What was that all about, back at the diner?" Harry asked.

Akane grinned. "You're new to New York, aren't you? Never seen one of these?" Smoothly, Akane drew her gun again and held it up so it was visible in the rear view mirror. "It's a Dominatrix. Smart guns, tied into the city's SIREN system. It can, at a glance, determine if you're a latent criminal or not."

Harry smirked contemptuously. "Can't be much good if it didn't pick me up."

Akane gave a tiny, wry smile of her own. "Oh, it did." she leveled the gun at the back of Harry's head. "I just wanted to know what you are doing in my city, babushka."

Harry blanched, and nearly slammed the car into oncoming traffic. "You're working for Dumbledore?" she asked.

"No." Harry said.

"Really?" she said. "I noticed your ID was expired. Have you gone AWOL?"

Harry nodded.

"I find it hard to believe." she said. "Sorry, but what are the odds of you stumbling into that scene? The guilty party always returns to the scene of the crime, so they say."

His hands sticky on the wheel, they drove on. "Really. Rin, tell her."

Rin sighed, rolling her eyes. "Yeah, we're not working for Dumbledore. Quite the reverse, actually."

Akane considered this. "I'll need you to take a little lie detecting test. Just to make sure, you see." she said. "Not that I don't trust you – but I don't trust you."

Ahead of them, the Police headquarters loomed out of the darkness, neon glowing in the swirling snow. The slush flew as the car zoomed down the road, and a light dusting of sugar began to grow on the windshield.

At Police Headquarters, Harry sat in front of an oddly shaped machine made up of several lenses that moved back and forth like a weaving loom, shuttling about this way and that. Akane sat across the table from Harry and began pressing on a tiny little bellows and aiming the lenses. "Now," she said "Reaction time is a factor in this, so please, pay attention."

Harry swallowed.

"You are in hell. Why?" she asked.

Harry blanched. "I don't understand the question.

"You're sitting alone in your kitchen. Your wife walks in and shows you a two page spread of a nude man"

Harry frowned. "What, is she gay?"

"She likes it so much she puts it up on the bed room wall."

Harry shook his head. "I wouldn't let her."

The questions continued. Against the window, light from a backlit fan shone as snow beat quietly on the pane. Harry felt his sanity slowly slipping away as the intense questions continued, his pulse quickening, his grip on the edge of the table tightening like a wrench on a nut.

Finally, the CID pulled the instruments down. "You're human. At least in the soul."

Harry stared bleakly at Akane. "What are you getting at?"

"Well," she said "I considered it a possibility that you were a replicant plant by Dumbledore. But, it seems you are human inside all that metal."

Harry stared at the unsympathetic woman who would so coldly write him off as nothing more than a toaster. "I never asked for this."

Sometime later, Harry and Rin were making breakfast in the headquarters canteen. Rin idly passed Harry a slice of bread and looked expectantly at him. Harry sighed and pressed the bread into his stomach, where it began to toast nicely. As it turns out, Doctor Reed always wanted to make toast in her belly button.

They sat and ate at a small plastic table, Harry eating fruit-loops and Rin enjoying her toast. Akane walked in, trench coat swishing behind her, and Rin held up a slice of toast with her foot, offering it to the CID. Akane waved it away with a repulsed expression. "They're performing the autopsy now. Come on."

They rose, and followed Akane down the cold steel corridors of the HQ to the operating theatre, where a pinched-faced man stood at the head of a table. The body had only just begun to thaw and an intern was hacking at it with a circular saw, pausing occasionally to warm his hands. The bodies were a neat pair, frozen white, skin raised in goose bumps.

The coroner tapped at a chart. "Contusions of the left vertebrae." he indicated. "Small stipulations on the left tonsil, which match the contusions. The left ventricle is deformed, possibly indicating an interest in rock music and gang affiliation. Cortical stack is destroyed in body A by slug A, likewise B stack for B slug. Heads are both missing, hands are both missing, so identification is made quite difficult. Both Caucasian, male, twenty to twenty five."

"How did you get the ages?" Akane asked.

"Lack of wear on the genitals." the Coronado nodded.

Akane lit a cigarette, and Harry reached to do the same. Rin rolled her eyes, hardened to death. Harry thought he had seen it all. He was used to oceans of blood, hot kitchens, living rooms, board rooms sprayed with viscera steaming like fried bacon. But then the headless bodies in the snow...actually, they weren't that bad, Harry concluded.

Suddenly, he had an epiphany. "Lack of wear...?" Harry leaned in close, and plucked a hair. "Doctor," said Harry, "What do you make of this?"

The doctor took the tiny frozen pubic hair from Harry and considered it for a moment. "Well..." he said, deliberating. "Maybe the world's tiniest violin string."

Harry shook his head. "It's dyed."

Everyone leaned in really close to look at the hair. Indeed. It was bright red. "So, what does this suggest?" the Coroner asked. "Perhaps the victim was into punk rock, and hooliganism."

Harry considered this. "Your city's pretty conformist, isn't it?"

Akane shrugged. "Maybe. It's the judgment of the SIREN system."

The three left the operating theatre and sat down at the canteen again to plan their next move. As they were pouring themselves coffee and Harry was tapping out another cigarette, the chief of police, or COP as his acronym went, came over and peered curiously at them. "Who are they?" he asked Akane.

The chief of police was a thin man with round spectacles, a nod to some sort of medievalist tradition of eye-correction before augmentation had fixed all eye issues. He wore street clothes, but carried himself with a quiet, understated confidence. He reminded Harry of an iceberg, all coolness that would allow anything to smash off it and smash itself into splinters.

Akane met his gaze, but nervously. "Harry Potter, and Rin Tezuka. They're consulting on the case, on a part-time basis."

The police chief coughed politely. "Very good. In my office, if you would." he gestured towards the door. Akane was swept into his office, a very neatly ordered room. In one corner, a set of image-finding consoles sat, screens dark. At the desk, a holographic display floated, numbers and maps and photographs slowly flowing by like magma on a basalt shelf.

"We're under pressure, Akane, to write this case of the Diner Duo as an open and shut suicide."

"Surely you can't be serious." Akane protested.

"I am serious." the police chief said. He paused for a moment, considering his next statement. "And don't give me any guff."

Akane frowned. "This is corruption, sir. Plain and simple."

The police chief slammed his fist down on the desk, and the holographic display jumped and sparked. "Damn it, Akane. You're the best investigator I have, but you're going too far!" He considered his next statement. "I could give you twenty-four hours to solve the case, but Hogwarts is pressuring me to shut it down now."

Akane grimaced. "I can't do that, sir."

The chief of police stared at Akane coldly. She knew she was throwing everything she had done for her career away, but it was her principles or her career. One or the other had to die. It was Sophie's choice all over again, reloaded.

"Give me your badge." the police chief said, extending his hand.

Trembling with despair and anger, she unclipped it from her coat and passed it to the police chief. When he moved to pull away, she held onto it a moment longer, both of them gripping it. She looked the chief of police in the eye. "This isn't over."

"No." said the chief of police. "I suppose it isn't." He took her badge, and Akane whirled around and sauntered out of the office to rejoin Harry and Rin.

They drove to the outskirts of town. Akane was in the driver's seat while Harry pored over case notes. They didn't have much to go on, he decided. "Where are we going?" Rin asked from the back.

"The re-sleeving facility." Akane said.

"Why?" asked Harry. "The stacks were fried. We couldn't get any information out them, so what's the point?"

"You'll see."

The three pulled up to a shiny, white metal building. The sidewalk lit up with LEDs to guide them towards the front of the building. A sign declared it "SECOND CHANCE NEW LIFE CENTRE" in bold neon, and someone had scratched a crude poem beneath it:

"There once was a man kicked the bucket,

His life it was over, he fucked it,

But he's back for more sin,

In a suitable skin,

Resleeved in a fine metal bucket"

Harry winced at the quality of the poetry, being a refined and sensitive soul at heart. He understood, under the crude words, that this facility would often sleeve people in cybernetic or robotic bodies – damaging to the human psyche. Usually, such people worked as mercenaries for the corporations, since no regular employer would accept them.

The sliding doors of the building slid open, revealing a smooth, glossy lobby. Here, people would meet loved ones in new bodies. Sometimes it was hard, Harry knew. But he also knew it was neccesary. A woman waved at the three of them, and Akane elbowed Harry politely. Jarred out of his reverie, he presented his Hogwarts ID badge and the receptionist politely rose, bowed, and pressed a button on the desk.

A man in a white coat nervously came out. He had a full, round white beard and a receding hairline, a large, bulbous nose and an intelligent sparkle to his eye. "Renko. What are you doing here?" he asked.

Akane gestured at Harry and Rin. "Doctor, meet Harry and Rin. The three of us are looking into a double murder committed not long ago. The details might concern you." She met the Doctor's eyes with a bleary, single minded stare, and the Doctor shook his head sadly.

"Well, all right, but not here." he said. "Follow me."

In the elevator, he appraised Harry and Harry appraised him. "You're a unique one." he mused aloud. "There's some brilliant work there. Was this the work of..." he shook his head. "Doctor Reed was the one who built most of my augmentations."

"Oh." said the Doctor. "I knew Reed once. Brilliant mind. That was before she moved on to Hogwarts, though, before she left the city's university." The elevator door opened with an almost inaudible hiss, and they entered the Doctor's laboratory. It was a mess of tables strewn with all manner of precise machinist's equipment. The body of a car was jacked off the ground, and a human-shaped frame was suspended from the ceiling by cables. A bank of computer monitors fed data from these cables produced a scrolling wall of numbers that meant nothing to Harry.

The doctor walked over to a coffee machine in the corner of the room and poured himself a cup. "Can I offer you some coffee?" he asked. Rin nodded, and the Doctor poured her a cup and handed it to her wordlessly.

"Doctor," Akane began. "You ought to see this."

She handed him a floppy drive, and he took it and slid it into a visualizer console. A holographic projection of the crime scene appeared around them, the bodies prominent. The doctor frowned, walking around the scene. He made a gesture, and it zoomed in.

"I was hoping..." began Akane.

"I can't help you." he said. "I don't do any more work for the police."

They looked at each other nervously. Harry spoke up. "We're...not with the police. We think it might be related to Hogwarts."

This got the Doctor's attention. "Well. I can't promise you anything, son, but I'll do what I can." and he turned to the hologram and began poking and prodding at it. Green wireframe began to build up around the scene. "I'll be a while. You make yourselves comfortable."

Akane and Harry watched him gradually rebuild the bodies. "He's...different." Harry thought aloud. "He doesn't have to work in a place like this with his genius. He could do anything he wanted, but he's working here, to help people."

Akane nodded.

Harry looked at her. "How long have you known him?"

"Since I began at the NYPD. He does reconstruction of crime scenes, of mutilated victims, and the like. Long time ago, there was a brutal series of killings where the murderers would take off the victim's faces – he holographically reconstructed them to identify them, and the NYPD has used him as a resource since."

"But why isn't he working with the police any more?"

Akane lit a cigarette. "You'll have to figure out that on your own." She left him standing there and walked over to a phone. He heard her dial a number. "Hello." she said. "Is comrade teacher Renko there?"

There was a pause.

"Well, tell him his wife called."

Akane sat in a corner of the lab, rereading the forensic report on her ebook reader, while Rin and Harry slowly watched the faces of the victims reforming before their very eyes. Harry gasped. Slowly, inexorably, Ron Weasley's face swam into view atop the layers of muscle and bone Light had constructed in the hologram. Harry reached out to touch his old friends face and the image, staring impassively, flickered as his hand went right through.

Dr. Light stood back, admiring his handiwork, and Akane tapped Harry on the shoulder. "You know this man?"

Nodding, Harry gazed at the holographic form. "He was my best friend. Now, now he's dead!" Holding his arm up to his forehead histrionically, Harry sunk to his knees.

"Why are there two of him?" Akane asked.

Both bodies were identical. Both bodies...were Ron Weasley.

Off in the distance, a foghorn went off.

Harry couldn't believe it. He hurtled down the steps of the resleeving facility and rushed into a phone booth, pushing aside the occupant, hanging up on their conversation and then lifting the receiver again to make his call as the former occupant raged at him from outside the booth.

He dialed Ron's phone number. "1111-1111-1111-11211-11-111-1-1111-1-111-1" Harry chanted.

The phone rang. A bead of sweat ran down Harry's temple, like the rain running down the outside of the phone booth. The phone rang again. Harry's heart beat in his chest with the rhythm of a peppy eurobeat song. The phone rang once more. Harry gulped, his adams apple swinging up and down like a demented clown sewn onto a jackhammer. The phone rang once more, and then a voice answered.

"Hello, this is Ron speaking, secret agent for Dumbledore's Army. How can I help you?"

Harry panicked and nearly dropped the receiver, but smoothly recovered and launched into his cover story. "Hello, my name is George. Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior?"

He felt, rather than heard. Ron recoil with disgust from the phone.

"Andbyanychanceareyoualreadydeadoraclone?" he said in a rush, realizing his ploy was failing.

Ron hung up, leaving Harry clutching the phone with more unanswered questions. Questions like: Was that really Ron? Who were the two bodies, if not Ron? Were they clones? Was Ron a time traveler? If Ron was a time traveler, wasn't it a paradox for him to have died twice?

Rain beat against the phonebooth, and Harry reached for a cigarette. The former occupant of the booth continued to rage outside, throwing garbage and feces at the glass while Harry slowly considered all the facts. What Harry really needed, Harry thought, was a detective like Cole Phelps. Back in 1812 when he and Cole fought in the war together, Harry learned that he was the best detective that ever was, liable to fly off the handle at any injustice and always get his man. Now he was dead, killed by ferocious African bees in the court of law. Harry wondered if they were technically African American bees, since they were in America when it happened and were only originally from Africa by descent.

Harry walked out of the phone booth, stopping only to steal the former occupants umbrella before slowly making his way up the stairs back into the facility.

Rin treated Harry to a quizzical look as he slunk back inside.


End file.
